Download or read book Social Choice and Democracy written by Norman Schofield and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mathematical theory of voting has intellectual roots extending back two centuries to the writings of Borda and Condorcet. Yet it has only been in the last forty years that general theorems have begun to emerge. With the publication of this volume, Norman Schofield brings the results together in a ,common framework. SOCIAL CHOICE AND DEMOCRACY, however, is not merely a synthetic exercise, for Schofield's own work over the last decade has constituted a major initiative in deepening and' broadening our general understanding of voting arrangements. At last the results of his research, bits and pieces of which have been reported in a number of journals of international standing and in various collections, are coherently and systematically presented as an entirety. For students of democracy -- chiefly philosophers and political scientists, but increasingly economists as well -- the insights of this volume are profound. From it I infer the following.
Download or read book Political Institutions written by Josep M. Colomer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of institutions is to establish the domains of public activity and the rules to select leaders. Democratic regimes organize in simple institutional frameworks to foster the concentration of power and alternative successive absolute winners and losers. They favour political satisfaction of relatively small groups, as well as policy instability. In contrast, pluralistic institutions produce multiple winners, including multiparty co-operation and agreements. They favour stable, moderate, and consensual policies that can satisfy large groups' interests on a great number of issues. The more complex the political institutions, the more stable and socially efficient the outcome will be. This book develops an extensive analysis of this relationship. It explores concepts, questions and insights based on social choice theory, while empirical focus is cast on more than 40 democratic countries and a few international organizations from late medieval times to the present. The book argues that pluralistic democratic institutions are judged to be better than simple formula of their higher capacity of producing socially satisfactory results.
Download or read book Social Choice and Democratic Values written by Eerik Lagerspetz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive overview and critique of the most important political and philosophical interpretations of the basic results of social choice, assessing their plausibility and seeking to identify the links between the theory of social choice and the more traditional issues of political theory and philosophy. In this regard, the author eschews a strong methodological commitment or technical formalism; the approach is instead based on the presentation of political facts and illustrated via numerous real-life examples. This allows the reader to get acquainted with the philosophical and political dispute surrounding voting and collective decision-making and its links to social choice theory.
Download or read book Logic and Social Choice RLE Social Theory written by Yasusuke Murakami and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is a social decision made out of individual members' decisions? This is one of the primary questions in the social sciences. Logic and Social Choice provides an answer to the topic by the application of mathematical logic. Yasusuke Murakami formulates social decision-making in logical terms, and shows that an analysis of social decision is equivalent to a logical calculus in many-valued logic. The logical conditions are then derived for various types of societies, especially for democracy. This foundation enables the author to discuss such topics as the relation between direct democracy and the representative system, a comparison of various rules of election, and the stability of social decision. The main conclusion is that inconsistency or paradox is inherent not only in voting and in democracy itself, but also in any piecemeal social decision-making.
Download or read book Liberalism against Populism written by William H. Riker and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 1988-07-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discoveries of social choice theory have undermined the simple and unrealistic nineteenth-century notions of democracy, especially the expectation that electoral institutions smoothly translate popular will directly into public policy. One response to these discoveries is to reject democracy out of hand. Another, which is the program of this book, is to save democracy by formulating more realistic expectations. Hence, this book first summarizes social choice theory in order to explain the full force of its critique. Then it explains, in terms of social choice theory, how politics and public issues change and develop. Finally, it reconciles democratic ideals with this new understanding of politics.
Download or read book Democratic Planning and Social Choice Dilemmas written by Tore Sager and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the economic approach of social choice theory, this unique book examines difficulties found in democratic processes involved in the creation and implementation of planning policies. Social choice theory focuses on the hard trade-offs to be made between rationality in decision-making on the one hand, and political values such as democracy, liberalism and freedom from manipulation on the other. As an institution can be seen as a set of rules, the focus on rules and procedures of collective choice makes social choice theory well suited for analysing important political aspects of planning institutions. Special attention is given to communicative planning and the logical reasons why all the desirable properties of dialogue cannot be simultaneously attained. The analysis provides original and significant new insights into the process and the institutions involved. It highlights weak spots of present planning techniques and procedures and suggests further steps towards institutionally enriched planning theory.
Download or read book Collective Decision Making written by norman schofield and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1996-09-30 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade the techniques of social choice theory, game theory and positive political theory have been combined in interesting ways so as to pro vide a common framework for analyzing the behavior of a developed political economy. Social choice theory itself grew out of the innovative attempts by Ken neth Arrow (1951) and Duncan Black (1948, 1958) to extend the range of economic theory in order to deal with collective decision-making over public goods. Later work, by William Baumol (1952), and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962), focussed on providing an "economic" interpretation of democratic institutions. In the same period Anthony Downs (1957) sought to model representative democracy and elections while William Riker (1962) made use of work in cooperative game theory (by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern, 1944) to study coalition behavior. In my view, these "rational choice" analyses of collective decision-making have their antecedents in the arguments of Adam Smith (1759, 1776), James Madison (1787) and the Marquis de Condorcet (1785) about the "design" of political institutions. In the introductory chapter to this volume I briefly describe how some of the current normative and positive aspects of social choice date back to these earlier writers.
Download or read book Collective Choice and Social Welfare written by Amartya Sen and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, this classic study has been recognized for its groundbreaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice, including aggregative assessment. It has also had a large influence on international organizations, including the United Nations, notably in its work on human development. The book showed that the "impossibility theorems" in social choice theory--led by the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow--do not negate the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice. Sen's ideas about social choice, welfare economics, inequality, poverty, and human rights have continued to evolve since the book's first appearance. This expanded edition preserves the text of the original while presenting eleven new chapters of fresh arguments and results. "Expanding on the early work of Condorcet, Pareto, Arrow, and others, Sen provides rigorous mathematical argumentation on the merits of voting mechanisms...For those with graduate training, it will serve as a frequently consulted reference and a necessity on one's book shelf." --J. F. O'Connell, Choice
Download or read book Social Choice and Individual Values written by Kenneth Joseph Arrow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1963-01-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature on the theory of social choice has grown considerably beyond the few items in existence at the time the first edition of this book appeared in 1951. Some of the new literature has dealt with the technical, mathematical aspects, more with the interpretive. My own thinking has also evolved somewhat, although I remain far from satisfied with present formulations. The exhaustion of the first edition provides a convenient time for a selective and personal stocktaking in the form of an appended commentary entitled, 'Notes on the Theory of Social Choice, 1963, ' containing reflections on the text and its omissions and on some of the more recent literature. This form has seemed more appropriate than a revision of the original text, which has to some extent acquired a life of its own.
Download or read book Classics of Social Choice written by Iain McLean and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the centuries an intriguing collection of thinkers have realized that voting and social choice are not straightforward. Yet despite the work of many distinguished contributors in this area, the subject has only become established in the last few decades. Indeed, many earlier writings were lost and their content forgotten, only to be rediscovered later and then forgotten again. This puzzling saga of intellectual history unfolds in Classics of Social Choice through these original writings. The editors have included recently discovered pieces and other major contributions - newly translated where necessary. The introduction explains who each writer was, locates him in a historical context, and analyzes his argument. It was only in the 1940s and 1950s that the theory of social choice was established by Duncan Black and Kenneth Arrow - whose Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in part for this work. It is now a large and thriving branch of economics and politics. Classics of Social Choice will interest anyone working in social choice theory as well as students of medieval thought, the Enlightenment, and constitutions.
Download or read book Mathematics of Social Choice written by Christoph Borgers and published by SIAM. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics of Social Choice is a fun and accessible book that looks at the choices made by groups of people with different preferences, needs, and interests. Divided into three parts, the text first examines voting methods for selecting or ranking candidates. A brief second part addresses compensation problems wherein an indivisible item must be assigned to one of several people who are equally entitled to ownership of the item, with monetary compensation paid to the others. The third part discusses the problem of sharing a divisible resource among several people. Mathematics of Social Choice can be used by undergraduates studying mathematics and students whose only mathematical background is elementary algebra. More advanced material can be skipped without any loss of continuity. The book can also serve as an easy introduction to topics such as the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, Arrow's theorem, and fair division for readers with more mathematical background.
Download or read book Social Choice and Individual Values written by Kenneth J. Arrow and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1951, "Social Choice and Individual Values" introduced "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" and founded the field of social choice theory in economics and political science. This new edition, including a new foreword by Nobel laureate Eric Maskin, reintroduces Arrow's seminal book to a new generation of students and researchers."Far beyond a classic, this small book unleashed the ongoing explosion of interest in social choice and voting theory. A half-century later, the book remains full of profound insight: its central message, 'Arrow's Theorem, ' has changed the way we think."--Donald G. Saari, author of "Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected "
Download or read book Theories of Democracy written by Frank Cunningham and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This descriptive more than prescriptive journey begins with an Anglo-North American overview of the democratic terrain and then zooms in on specific democratic landscapes: liberal, classic pluralism, catallaxy (exchange economics applied to political science), participatory democracy, democratic pragmatism, deliberative democracy, and radical pluralism. Democracy's place within a globalizing world occupies the last chapter. Cunningham (philosophy, U. of Toronto) admits he leans toward democratic pragmatism as espoused in John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927). Suitable for an introductory university course. Distributed by Taylor & Francis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Democratic Deliberation and Social Choice written by Christian List and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democratic decision making cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires reasoned and well-informed discussion by those involved in and/or subject to the decisions in question, under conditions of equality and respect. In short, democracy requires deliberation. In formal political theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused less on deliberation, and more on the aggregation of individual preferences or opinions into collective decisions - social choices - 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 showing that collective decision making cannot generally satisfy certain plausible desiderata. Any democratic aggregation rule that we use in practice seems, at best, a compromise. Initially, the two literatures were largely disconnected from each other. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a growing dialogue between them. This paper reviews the connections between the two. Deliberative democratic theory is relevant to social choice theory in that deliberation can complement aggregation and open up an escape route from some of its negative results. Social choice theory is relevant to deliberative democratic theory in that its formal models can shed light on some aspects of deliberation, such as the nature of deliberation-induced opinion change. The paper is structured as follows. First, I introduce the notions of social choice and deliberation. Next, I discuss several hypotheses on the effects of deliberation on preferences and assesses their implications for social choice. Then I review some social-choice-theoretic models of deliberation and consider the mechanisms of deliberation-induced opinion change. Finally, I address deliberation from the perspective of judgment-aggregation theory, the branch of social choice theory that focuses on the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences.
Download or read book Social Choice Routledge Revivals written by Bernhardt Liebermann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-25 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1971, Social Choice is both a text and reference containing the proceedings of a conference dealing with contemporary work on the normative and descriptive aspects of the social choice problem. This reissue will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on group decision making and social choice. Economists, social psychologists, political scientists and sociologists will welcome this valuable work.
Download or read book Social Choice and Legitimacy written by John W. Patty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both earlier critics and defenders of social choice theory, Patty and Penn argue that the classic impossibility theorems of Arrow, Gibbard, and Satterthwaite are inescapably relevant to, and indeed justify, democratic institutions. Specifically, these institutions exist to do more than simply make policy - through their procedures and proceedings, these institutions make sense of the trade-offs required when controversial policy decisions must be made.
Download or read book Democracy written by Ricardo Blaug and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when democracy appears to be universally acclaimed as the only acceptable form of government, it is all the more necessary to be clear about what democracy means. Democracy: A Reader provides a range of pivotal statements on this important topic from supporters and defenders as well as critics and skeptics.
