Search Results

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

This chapter is devoted to theoretical models, which are characterized by their reliance on deductive reasoning, their technique (social choice and game theory), and their level of abstraction. Although there are many ways to categorize models, we create a classification scheme that is consistent with the usefulness and purpose of models. Models serve in any one, or more, of four different roles: foundational, organizational, exploratory, and predictive. We argue that models should be judged, not by how well they predict, which is a common standard, but by how useful they are. This approach avoids the arbitrary precision of cookbook methodologies, and properly calls attention to the role of taste in choosing between theoretical models.

This chapter presents a new basic model, which consists of a common language of evaluation, a set of judges, and a set of competitors. It expresses the problem of what to do with judges’ scores and how to resolve them into a single score in a concise or systematic way. The model identifies the shortcomings of traditional models of social choice theory and provides a new model as an alternative. Six axioms of the basic model are satisfied in a method of grading called social grading function f, in which there is no ambiguity in grading, and the final grade assigned to every single alternative is independent of all other alternatives. The deep preferences or utilities of a judge or a voter play an important role in voting and judging as every decision-maker tries to maximize his utility.

In this chapter, Primo and Milyo offer a theoretical foundation for why and how public perceptions of American democracy are thought to be tied to the role of money in the political system. They cast doubt on these microfoundations, showing that a hydraulic theory of influence implies that attempts to limit access and influence by restricting campaign contributions will lead to a reorientation of efforts by affected interests—not capitulation. Moreover, because research in social choice theory establishes there is no such thing as the “will of the people,” the notion that money in politics “distorts” outcomes—a central claim of campaign finance reformers—has little meaning in the absence of some normative standard, which itself will be the subject of dispute.

This chapter describes the majority judgment method used to elect officials; to classify wines; and to judge Olympic competitors in skating, diving, and gymnastics. It also provides ways to counteract cheating and strategic manipulation of the judges or the voters. The desirable properties of classical social choice theory are satisfied by the majority judgment method. The chapter also explains several key ideas, including majority-grade, majority-ranking, majority-value, majority-gauge, abbreviated majority-value, and kth-order function. It demonstrates the superiority of the majority judgment to any other method of voting and judging competitions by comparing the basic principles of the traditional theory of social choice.

This book has presented several traditional and new methods of social choice theory, providing solutions to the problems of how to elect, judge, or rank. Four major arguments, including human behavior, gaming the vote, meaningfulness, and practice, which make the majority judgment the most suitable method to be used for voting and rating, have also been presented. The creation and use of common languages of grades for voters or judges have also been demonstrated through the Orsay experiment. The book has emphasized that the properties of good mechanisms for aggregating opinions are determined by various elements, including common sense, ethics, and the realities of human behavior.

This chapter focuses on the use of majority-ranking compared with the traditional model of social choice theory. Social grading function as strategy-proof-in-ranking is used in the chapter to illustrate the dominance of the strategy for judges to assign grades according to their wishes. The difference of the ranking procedure used by the International Skating Union (ISU) and the majority-ranking is presented, highlighting ISU’s use of increasingly ad hoc devices for its majority-grade system. Precision of majority-ranking is compared with ISU’s ranking system along with the comparison of majority-ranking for the SCW, election Society with ISU’s ranking system. The chapter presents the majority-ranking characterization that equals majority-grade characterization.

This chapter focuses on majority judgment drawbacks. Properties, including participant-consistency, join-consistency, and proper cancellation, which majority judgment does not satisfy, are also lacking in other traditional models of social choice theory. The chapter concludes that majority judgment is a practical method for ranking and electing, and is a choice-monotonic, rank-monotonic, and strongly monotonic method. Drawbacks of traditional models are also highlighted, and it is stated that the traditional models lack guarantees of change in the estimation of voters without affecting the outcome of the election or ranking. The chapter discusses the critics of the majority judgment, who do not take into consideration the strategic behavior of judges and voters.

Most health economists value health states by their contribution to well-being, and they measure well-being and the value of health by eliciting preferences. If the satisfaction of preferences does not constitute well-being, can well-being still be measured by preferences? After clarifying what economists take preferences to be, this chapter argues that there is a connection between preferences and welfare that makes it possible in favorable circumstances to measure well-being by measuring preferences. This connection does not assume that preference satisfaction constitutes well-being. This chapter also distinguishes preferences both from other attitudes that generate rankings of health states and from feelings or subjective experiences. It concludes by addressing the analogy between the way that values are assigned to health states by measuring preferences and the way in which social choice theorists rely on preferences to evaluate social policies.

Health economists can draw conclusions about what makes people better off from the preferences of competent evaluators if three conditions are met: (1) respondents have true beliefs concerning the relevant facts; (2) their preferences reflect their judgment concerning what promotes their own interests; and (3) their preferences satisfy the standard axioms and are not distorted by deliberative flaws. In the special context of eliciting preferences in order to assign values to health states, health economists might be able to shape the circumstances to enable people to satisfy the three conditions. This chapter shows that health economists have failed to implement this strategy and considers how much economists can do. In particular it considers the questions of whose preferences to elicit, whether averaging is defensible, and whether health economists should be eliciting preferences rather than attempting to evaluate health states themselves.