Abstract
The theory of social choice analyzes how the tastes, preferences, or values of individual persons are amalgamated and summarized into the collective choice of a group or society. As such, this theory must include, among other elements, a theory of voting because voting is one method of aggregating values. Voting itself is in turn an indispensable feature of democracy because, however democracy is defined in terms of its goals, its method involves some kind of popular participation in government. While participation can take many forms, historically—and probably logically—it invariably includes the method of voting. Necessarily, therefore, the theory of social choice is highly relevant to the theory of democracy.
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Notes
Duncan Black, The Theory of Committee and Elections ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958 ).
Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963 ).
Robin Farquharson, Theory of Voting ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969 ).
See, for example, Dennis F. Thompson in The Democratic Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 43. Thompson recognizes that the theory of collective choice “remains a serious difficulty for any democratic theory” but avoids dealing with it himself because he is concerned with individual actions.
Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956 ), pp. 42–44.
William H. Riker, Democracy in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1964), chapter 1. The documents were Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Agreement of the People, the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Allen Gibbard, “Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result,” Econometrica 41 (1973): 587–601; Mark Satterthwaite, “Strategy Proofness and Arrow’s Conditions,” Journal of Economic Theory 10 (1975): 187–217.
Richard D. McKelvey, “Intransitivities in Multi-Dimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control,” Journal of Economic Theory 12 (1976): 472–482. Norman Schofield, “Instability of Simple Dynamic Games,” Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming.
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© 1981 Martinus Nijhoff Publishing
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Riker, W.H. (1981). A Confrontation between the Theory of Social Choice and the Theory of Democracy. In: Braham, R.L. (eds) Social Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8162-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8162-1_7
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