Thus, Professor Buchanan's insights have led the way for calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment that would bind all the actors within the policy process, politicians, special interest groups, and voters. The primary actor in the Keynesian paradigm is the central government. For a Keynesian, only the central government has the scope and means to smooth out the bumps of the market economy. The Buchanan paradigm, on the other hand, leads to exactly the opposite conclusion. To see why, recall that a specific public policy is absolutely sanctioned only by the unanimous consent of voters.
Unanimity becomes the benchmark of efficiency.
11 Unanimity can be most closely approximated only at that level of government that contains voters directly affected by the policy in question. The result of this condition is a re-emphasis on federalism and the devolution of collective choice to the most local level possible. The unanimity requirement of Buchanan's constitutional construct is reinforced by the public choice analysis of voting. In short, public choice theory has found voting, particularly for national candidates, irrational. The reason is that the likelihood of an individual's vote affecting the outcome of a national election is astronomically high.