Egalitarian Decision Making without Equality: Lessons from Needs Based Leadership and Consensus in Animal Societies

Drawing on formal models and empirical studies of collective decision making in animal groups, we show that egalitarian systems can emerge and remain stable despite persistent individual inequalities in needs, information, and social position. Egalitarianism is best understood as a dynamic regulation of influence under heterogeneous conditions, where leadership is conditional, distributed, and reversible rather than fixed or coercive.