Abstract
Can a group of people, operating under majority rule procedures, make better judgments than any one of the individuals comprising the group? Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” seemed to suggest a positive answer to this question, at the same time that it generated criticism as an overly romantic or even mystical construct. However, in an insightful paper, Grofman and Feld (1988) argue that Rousseau’s notion of the general will is supported by Condorcet’s jury theorem.
The work in this chapter is based on research supported by NSF Grant SES-92-40800. This chapter was written before Chapter 18 of this volume.
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Ladha, K.K., Miller, G. (1996). Political Discourse, Factions, and the General Will: Correlated Voting and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem. In: Schofield, N. (eds) Collective Decision-Making: Social Choice and Political Economy. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 50. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8767-9_19
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