Macaques Democrats?

A macaque Tonkean. (source)
Odile Petit is "behavioral scientist" at CNRS. She summarized research on various collective behaviors of primates (and other animals - in the second part of issue) on the air of France Culture, December 27, 2010, in issuing Continent Science.

The researcher traced the issue essentially an outline of the social organization of macaques Tonkean. In these animals, the dominant individuals alone do not determine the behavior of groups, such as travel. Instead, group members seem to suggest directions of movement. Odile Petit and his collaborators were able to show that the collective decisions of the group are under a system which can be likened to a form of democracy, far from the tyrannies that usually imagined in primates.

The concepts of quorum and vote "are advanced by ethologists. For more information on this exciting business, you can read a paper in French by Bernard Thierry, or see this article in English, published in 2009. Also read the book I help myself either, appeared Vuibert.