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Empirical social choice: an introduction

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[Even] if an omniscient observer, call him Zeus, knew the true tastes of every voter, it would still be impossible for him to predict the social choice or the product of aggregating preferences unless he also knew the method of aggregation. This means that the social choice depends not simply on the wills of individuals, but also on the method used to summarize these wills.

William H. Riker (1982: 31)

Abstract

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.

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Notes

  1. Two distinguished students of Riker’s view Liberalism against populism as his most seminal work (Bueno de Mesquita and Shepsle 2001). Looking at the number of citations relative to the age of the publication, the book certainly is the most influential single work by Riker, cf. Maske and Durden (2003: 193ff).

  2. In 2013 Google Scholar counted Liberalism against populism as having been cited almost 2300 times (ca. 750 times going by the Social Science Citation Index). His seminal article in American Political Science Review on disequilibrium in majority decision-making (Riker 1980) was in many ways a precursor to the 1982 book and had in 2013 been cited almost 900 times (ca. 300 citations in SSCI). Riker’s direct follow-up to the book, the less technical and more popular The art of political manipulation (Riker 1986), had been cited ca. 1250 times. Together the citations of two of these three matches Riker’s most cited work, A theory of political coalitions (ca. 3150 citations). For an earlier citation analysis of Riker’s works (using only SSCI data), see Maske and Durden (2003).

  3. Shortly after his death the editors of the pluralistic, multidisciplinary New handbook of political science (Goodin and Klingemann 1996) estimated that across all the sub-disciplines of political science Riker shared a third place in terms of citations, along with Gabriel Almond and Robert Dahl. Quite remarkably Riker’s own student, Kenneth Shepsle, beat him, sharing second place with Seymour Martin Lipset, with Sidney Verba in first place. Riker was also judged to be one of a small group of “highly visible integrators” making an impact across a wide set of sub-disciplines within political science. (See Goodin and Klingemann 1996: 31, 34 and 41.)

  4. On the life and academic contributions of Riker more broadly, see, e.g., Mitchell (1994), Bueno de Mesquita and Shepsle (2001), McLean (2002, 2008), Aldrich (2004).

  5. On Riker’s role as the founder of the “Rochester School” or “positive political theory”, see Mitchell (1988) and Amadae and Bueno de Mesquita (1999).

  6. See Smith (2009). Smith’s analysis has only been published on-line; all of the information presented here is derived from that presentation.

  7. There may have been fraud involved in the election, but for the present purposes these official results have been treated as the correct ones.

  8. See Smith (2009) for further details, calculations and reservations about the conclusions.

  9. See also Kurrild-Klitgaard (2005: 124–138). For presentations of these and other voting methods and their properties when choosing between more than two alternatives, see, e.g., Riker (1982: 66–101), Nurmi (1987).

  10. A very obvious (but far from isolated) example derived from the US Congress was the case of the impeachment of President Clinton, wherein the House leadership simply refused to allow a vote on an alternative they knew would pass (Kurrild-Klitgaard 1999).

  11. Strategic (insincere) voting is characterized by some voters casting ballots for lower ranked candidates or alternatives in order to avoid even worse outcomes (for them) that otherwise will be selected on the basis of the “setter’s” agenda.

  12. Cf. Federalist #51, in Hamilton et al. [1787] (2001).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Steve Brams, Bernie Grofman, Iain McLean, Mike Munger and Gordon Tullock for many enlightening discussions on these topics over the years and to Bill Shughart for helpful comments.

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  1. Dept. of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, P.O. Box 2099, 1014, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard

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Kurrild-Klitgaard, P. Empirical social choice: an introduction. Public Choice 158, 297–310 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0164-4

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