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Some social choice theorists attempt to turn the science of politics against democracy in general and deliberative democracy in particular. They claim the arbitrariness and instability of democracy will be exacerbated by unconstrained deliberation. The response shows that there are mechanisms endogenous to deliberation that can respond to the social choice theory critique, emphasizing the construction of public opinion through the contestation of discourses in the public sphere and its transmission to the state by communicative means, including rhetoric.

This chapter challenges the widespread idea that legitimate social choice in global politics can be achieved solely through representation by nation-states — either as a means of aggregating individual preferences across territorial states, or as a means of conducting deliberative decision making among the cultural entities of ‘nations’. It begins by explaining that any representative democratic theory of legitimate social choice must be built upon two kinds of argument: an explication of and justification for the underlying normative conception of interest representation; and an explanation of how the proposed constituency boundaries can effectively enact the ideal of interest representation in practice. It then develops a critique of the conventional nation-state-based model of global representation, examining both some normative and practical justifications for this model that are based upon a ‘burkean’ model of interest representation and linked to the notion of a nation, and some alternative justifications that are based upon a liberal individualist model of interest representation and linked to the notion of a state. This analysis highlights several significant normative weaknesses of nation-state representation, and concludes accordingly that nation-state representation cannot alone achieve legitimate social choice in global politics.

Social choice theory helps to design a research strategy. Three institutional variables producing different degrees of stability and different amounts of social utility are: (1) the dispersion of voters’ preferences, corresponding to simple and complex electorates; (2) the inclusiveness of different voting and electoral rules; and (3) the number of issue dimensions in single and separate elections, corresponding to schemes of unity and division of powers.

Small, homogeneous communities in medieval and early modern times were able to make consensual social choices by voting with relatively broad voting rights. In complex societies in modern times, the enlargement of the electorate until introducing universal suffrage rights was developed with different enfranchisement paces, electoral rules, and party systems, producing different degrees of political instability.

This chapter discusses social choice theory, an axiomatic and deductive approach to societal problem solving by existing or possible voting procedures. Social choice theory in economics and political science considers how the members of a society such as voters or policy makers may make societal decisions such as selection among competing candidates to office or policies by existing or possible voting systems. Thus, social combination models and social choice theory address the same basic issue: the aggregation of group member preferences to a collective group response. As a historical example, the representatives from the American colonies who met at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 faced a multitude of judgmental issues on the composition, powers, and procedures of their government. Over four months, they achieved consensus on the U.S. Constitution. Once this consensus on judgmental issues was achieved, the U.S. Constitution became a conceptual system and guide for group problem solving for subsequent generations of Americans.

This chapter argues that achieving legitimate social choice in global politics requires the establishment of a decision-making process involving deliberation among multi-stakeholder representatives, which could redress the weaknesses of the nation-state model in crucial ways. It begins by outlining the key institutional features of the ‘multi-stakeholder’ model, and explaining how it can employ the representation of multi-stakeholder interests by NGOs either to supplement, or to substitute for, the representation of nation-state constituencies by governments. It then examines the theoretical basis of the multi-stakeholder model, and argues that it can be justified within the framework of a theoretical model of interest representation that is characterised here as ‘liberal pluralist’. It further examines the strengths and weaknesses of the multi-stakeholder model as a framework for global representation, and concludes that we should endorse a hybrid approach to delineating democratic constituencies in global politics — one that incorporates multi-stakeholder representation within more conventional structures of representation by nation-states.

This final chapter summarizes the evidence and identifies remaining questions. It argues that obesity policy is as much a question of social choice as of biology. It gives the key points raised by the book. It claims that obesity poses a modern day challenge to understanding human health and welfare and that it may be due to technological change. Obesity policy needs economics for risk assessment and management. It also offers that obesity cannot be changed by information policy alone but with a combination of fat taxes and thin subsidies.

This chapter addresses the challenges that social choice theory brings to normative claims about democracy. Social choice theorists commonly critique democratic decision making on the grounds that voting is susceptible to unavoidable pathologies and that insofar as voting is essential to democracy, those pathologies subvert the normative legitimacy of democratic outcomes. Because voting is an essential component of any democratic institutional arrangement in any large, heterogeneous, complex society, the systematic instability and ambiguity that social choice theorists establish raises serious, unavoidable difficulties for some interpretations of democracy. Yet populism and liberalism hardly exhaust the theoretical vantage points from which such findings might be interpreted. Indeed, the chapter offers a reading of social choice theory that suggests an obvious, justifiable response to the putative dilemma fabricated by theorists who insist that the only available options are an impossible populism or an unpalatable liberalism.

Introduces basic concepts of social choice. Describes the median voter theorem for one issue dimension, and its chaotic failure in more than one. It explains what rhetoric and heresthetics are, also how veto games and credible commitments have operated in British politics since 1846. It introduces W.H. Riker's account of the triumph of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

This chapter examines three ways that political argument can affect democratic decision making and, thus, significantly mitigate the force of the social choice challenge. By engaging in political argument, relevant agents can settle the dimensions that, in any instance, structure their disagreements. This causal effect not only dampens the prospects that collective decision making will generate cyclical outcomes, it thereby reduces the opportunities for strategic manipulation that such instability presents. Once the analytical argument has established the possibility that voting, augmented by argument, could produce normatively legitimate decisions, the chapter considers two ways in which democratic argument can enhance the quality of such decisions: diversity and reflexivity.

In 1970 Amartya Sen introduced within social choice theory the notion of minimal liberty and proved an impossibility result concerning social decision functions. In this chapter Sen's condition of (minimal) liberty is weakened within the framework of social choice rules. It is then shown that the same kind of impossibility obtains for social choice functions.

This chapter provides an overview of developments in the fields of decision theory and social choice as surveyed in the chapters of the book. The chapter identifies and contextualizes these developments according to a variety of themes. For the first covering decision theory, rational choice and utility, the Introduction discusses models that generalize expected utility theory, changes in the conception of formal rational choice, models of choice over time and learning, experimental evidence and economic applications, state‐dependent utility and measures of diversity. For the second covering social choice and welfare, this overview discusses formal and philosophical theories that move beyond utilitarianism, justice and welfare, and applications to problems of health and demography and work on freedom, responsibility and the capabilities approach. These key themes in both fields of endeavour indicate a significant development in our understanding of how rational and social choice can be theorized.

Most, if not all, practitioners of welfare economics and social choice theory are presumed to be welfaristic in their conviction. Indeed, they evaluate the goodness of an economic policy and/or economic system in terms of the welfare that people receive at the culmination outcomes thereby generated. Recent years have witnessed a substantial upsurge of interest in the non‐welfaristic bases, or even the non‐consequentialist bases, of welfare economics and social choice theory. Capitalizing on the axiomatic approach explored in the recent past, this chapter tries to provide a coherent analysis of consequentialism vis‐a‐vis non‐consequentialism. To begin with, this chapter develops an abstract framework in which the primitive of the analysis is a preference ordering held by an evaluator over the pairs of culmination outcomes, and opportunity sets from which those culmination outcomes are chosen. As a partial test to see how much relevance can be claimed the axiomatized concepts of consequentialism and non‐consequentialism, two simple applications of this abstract framework are worked out. The first application is to the Arrovian social choice theory, and the second application is to the analysis of ultimatum games.

This chapter examines the notion of ‘irrelevant alternatives’ in the context of social choice problems. It is shown that seemingly irrelevant alternatives could be relevant because of their information content. This leads to a consideration of aggregation rules where an endogenous condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives is imposed. The analysis leads to the characterization of a unique procedure to aggregate preferences — Borda's rule. This new characterization provides insight into independence conditions and into the status of Borda's rule. An extension to a domain incorporating interpersonal comparisons is also pursued.

The modern theory of social choice contains a number of attempts to develop a defence of particular voting or collective decision procedures by appeal to axioms aimed at characterising one or another aspect of procedural fairness. This chapter examines democracy and social choice based on the work of William Riker, who has argued that social choice theory undermines the coherence of populist democratic theory and makes plausible only a very weak form of Madisonian liberalism. In Riker's view, voting is legitimate and desirable only because it enables us to remove officials, thereby constraining their ability arbitrarily to constrain our liberty over time. Riker claims not only that attempts to justify decision rules on procedural or axiomatic grounds fail, but also that proceduralism is itself an inadequate basis for evaluating collective decision-making institutions.

This chapter draws on social choice theory and proposes incompletely theorized agreements (ITAs) as an approach to collective decision‐making in public policy and human rights. The chapter presents difficulties in social choice, as illustrated by Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and delineates three ITA models, incompletely specified agreements, and incompletely specified and generalized agreements. Health and health capabilities are multidimensional concepts about which there is no unique view. This chapter develops the ITA framework to health and health care decision‐making, and begins to operationalize the health capability paradigm by extending it when dominance partial ordering and incomplete specification cannot resolve conflicts among different views about health. The incomplete ordering of the capability view, in combination with incompletely theorized agreements on that ordering, allows for reasoned health policy development and analysis in the face of pluralism and conflicting views.