The Social Choice Theory: Can it be Considered a Complete Political Theory?

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Bojan Todosijević
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
The Social

Precursors to Public Choice

2019 ◽  
pp. 796-816
Author(s):  
Iain McLean
Keyword(s):  
Public Choice ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mathematical Skill ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter reviews the many appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of axiomatic thought about social choice and elections since the era of ancient Greek democracy. Social choice is linked to the wider public-choice movement because both are theories of agency. Thus, just as the first public-choice theorists include Hobbes, Hume, and Madison, so the first social-choice theorists include Pliny, Llull, and Cusanus. The social-choice theory of agency appears in many strands. The most important of these are binary vs. nonbinary choice; aggregation of judgement vs. aggregation of opinion; and selection of one person vs. selection of many people. The development of social choice required both a public-choice mindset and mathematical skill.

Bargaining in Legislatures

1989 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 1181-1206 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Baron ◽  
John A. Ferejohn
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
The Social ◽  
Free Model ◽  
Sequential Nature ◽  
Choice Literature ◽  
Formal Rules

Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.

scholarly journals SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY, GAME THEORY, AND POSITIVE POLITICAL THEORY

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 259-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Austen-Smith ◽  
Jeffrey S. Banks
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory

scholarly journals Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources

2006 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 315-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. Endriss ◽  
N. Maudet ◽  
F. Sadri ◽  
F. Toni
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Choice ◽  
Multiagent System ◽  
Optimal Allocation ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Artificial Society ◽  
The Social ◽  
Optimal Allocations

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, we show how certain classes of deals are both sufficient and necessary to guarantee that a socially optimal allocation of resources will be reached eventually.

On Sen's Liberal Paradox and its Reception within Political Theory and Welfare Economics

Politics ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Vanhuysse
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Welfare Economics ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Liberal Paradox

In this article, Amartya Sen's seminal proof of the impossibility of a Paretian liberal is briefly reviewed. I then discuss the reception of this alleged ‘liberal paradox’ within the fields of political theory and welfare economics. In particular, I examine the criticisms made by Brian Barry, and their wider implications for the field of social choice theory. It is argued that the various criticisms made on Sen's characterisation of liberty are fundamental, and that Sen's subsequent defence of his position is unconvincing. Moreover, there remain some wider doubts as to the usefulness of social choice theory's SWF approach to individual rights and freedoms.

John Roemer’s Economic Philosophy and the Perils of Formalism

1989 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 267-279
Author(s):  
Drew Christie
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Philosophy ◽  
Means Of Production

John Roemer’s recent work uses the mathematics of Social Choice Theory to examine the structure of socialist ideals. One striking conclusion is that the social ownership of the means of production entails the strict equalization of ‘utility.’1 The conclusion is surprising. While of course opposing many existing inequalities, socialists (as opposed to their critics) have not traditionally understood socialism to require strict equalization. Marx, for example, is scathing in his criticism of levelling, which he sees as a form of ‘crude’ communism.2This paper is both exposition and critique. By way of exposition, I show with less than full mathematical rigor what several of Roemer’s axioms of social ownership mean and why they entail the equality of utility.

The Possibility of Self-Government

2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Bird
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Intuitive Concept ◽  
The Common

Many have suggested that the findings of social choice theory demonstrate that there can be no “will of the people.” This has subversive implications for our intuitive concept of self-government. I explore the relation between the notion of a “social will,” that of self-government, and the impossibility theorems of social choice theory. I conclude that although the concept of the social will is essential to that of self-government, the findings of social choice theory do not cast doubt upon the possibility of either. Unlike many attempts to respond to the threat posed by social choice theory, my argument does not require any appeal to the problematic notion of the common good.

scholarly journals Multicriteria ABC Inventory Classification Using the Social Choice Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Fan Liu ◽  
Ning Ma
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Correlation Method ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Inventory Cost ◽  
The Social ◽  
Criteria Importance ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Substantial Degree

The multicriteria ABC inventory classification has been widely adopted by organizations for the purpose of specifying, monitoring, and controlling inventory efficiently. It categorizes the items into three groups based on some certain criteria, such as inventory cost, part criticality, lead time, and commonality. There has been extensive research on such a problem, but few have considered that the judgments about criteria’s importance order usually exhibit a substantial degree of variability. In light of this, we propose a new methodology for handling the multicriteria ABC inventory classification problem using the social choice theory. Specifically, the pessimistic and optimistic results for all possible individual judgments are obtained in a closed-form manner, which are then balanced by the Hurwicz criterion with a “coefficient of optimism”. The CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method is used to aggregate the individual judgments into a collective choice, according to which the items are classified into Groups A, B, and C. Through a numerical experiment, we show that the proposed methodology not only considers all possible preferences among the criteria, but also generates flexible classification schemes.

Democratic Deliberation and Social Choice

2018 ◽  
pp. 462-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian List
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Escape Route ◽  
Democratic Deliberation ◽  
Opinion Change ◽  
Negative Results ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
Shed Light

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires deliberation. In formal social choice theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused primarily on the aggregation of individual opinions into collective decisions, typically through voting. While the literature on deliberation has an optimistic flavour, the literature on social choice is more mixed. It is centred around several paradoxes and impossibility results identifying conflicts between different intuitively plausible desiderata. In recent years, there has been a growing dialogue between the two literatures. This paper discusses the connections between them. Important insights are that (i) deliberation can complement aggregation and open up an escape route from some of its negative results; and (ii) the formal models of social choice theory can shed light on some aspects of deliberation, such as the nature of deliberation-induced opinion change.

scholarly journals Social Contract, Extended Goodness, and Moral Disagreement

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cyril Hédoin
Keyword(s):  
Social Choice ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Choice Theory ◽  
Social Choice Theory ◽  
Moral Disagreement ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Interpersonal Comparisons ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
Extended Preferences

This article discusses the role played by interpersonal comparisons (of utility or goodness) in matters of justice and equity. The role of such interpersonal comparisons has initially been made explicit in the context of social choice theory through the concept of extended preferences. Social choice theorists have generally claimed that extended preferences should be taken as being uniform across a population. Three related claims are made within this perspective. First, though it is sometimes opposed to social choice theory, the social contract approach may also consider the possibility of interpersonal comparisons. This is due to the fact that justice principles may be partially justified on a teleological basis. Second, searching for the uniformity of interpersonal comparisons is both hopeless and useless. In particular, moral disagreement does not originate in the absence of such uniformity. Third, interpersonal comparisons should be accounted for both in social choice and social contract theories in terms of sympathetic identification based on reciprocal respect and tolerance, where each person’s conception of the good partially takes care of others’ good. From the moral point of view, any person’s conception of the good should thus be ‘extended’ to others’ personal conceptions. This extension is, however, limited due to the inherent limitations in sympathetic identification and is a long way from guaranteeing the uniformity assumed by social choice theorists.

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