The democratic deficit in the so-called bargaining democracy provides the
motivation for constitutional efforts to limit the ability of different groups to form
coalitions that are able to grant benefits to themselves through legislation that more
or less directly benefit identifiable groups. A constitutional hierachy of laws that
stand in conflict is proposed. In this hierarchy more "rule-oriented" legislation
dominate less "rule-oriented" legislation. The main purpose of the proposal is to
create a momentum of the political process towards more rule-oriented policy
actions and legislation, and to inspire the policy debate to focus on principles and
rules to an increasing extent. At the same time, the difficulty of defining a rule as
opposed to an outcome-oriented directive is avoided by limiting the task of a
constitutional court to simply rank conflicting policy actions with respect to the
degree actions satisfy criteria for rules.
