Approaching language rights and justice for linguistic minorities from the perspective of constitutional economics

Abstract Methodological individualism is a central concept in normative economics. As the point of departure of our discussion of linguistic justice, we postulates the equality of all individuals in relation to their first language. Any deviation from this ideal has to be motivated. One such motivation is the impracticability of policy measures, for instance due to cost arguments. A constitutional-economics analysis of the allocation of language rights focuses on this trade-off between equity and efficiency. One can define a scale running from perfect equality combined with extensive inefficiency to perfect efficiency combined with considerable inequalities between different individuals of different mother tongues. “(Linguistic) justice” of public policy is then defined as an “optimal” choice, or trade-off, on this scale. For the analysis, two tools in the tool chest of the economist will be applied in this essay: An intuitive-imaginary analysis, based on a Gedankenexperiment involving an imaginary “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” from which the choice between different societies can be seen as an individual’s choice of implicit income distributions under uncertainty about the individual’s own position in this distribution. The chosen society is then defined as “just” and the choice is determined by the individuals’ attitude towards uncertainty. A formal-axiomatic definition of a (paretian) social-welfare function in implicit incomes (money income plus perceived value of, for instance, language rights) of all citizens in the society. The definition of “justice” is then found in the formal properties of this welfare function. Both approaches lead to the same qualitative results.