 Majority DecisionEerik Lagerspetz
Chapter Chapter 2 in Social Choice and Democratic Values, 2016, pp 17-51 from Springer Abstract: Abstract This chapter provides a brief history of voting and of collective decision-making, especially in the medieval Catholic Church and in the late medieval and early modern representative bodies. The focal questions are how and why people accepted the authority of any purely mechanical procedure—be it the simple majority-principle, a two-third rule, or something else. This is not just a historical problem. Rather, some important theoretical disputes on the nature of democracy are related to this issue. The development of democracy can been as a breakthrough of the legitimacy of purely mechanical procedures. I present the most elementary result of the social-choice theory: the so-called May’s Theorem. I review the discussions about the theorem and try to show how, contrary to some claims, it captures at least a part of the democratic idea of political equality. The “paradoxes” of the social choice emerge when we move away from the simplest case characterized by a single issue, only two options, and a direct choice. Keywords: Social Choice; Majority Rule; Default Rule; Majority Principle; Unanimity Rule (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-319-23261-4_2 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-23261-4_2 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Studies in Choice and Welfare from Springer |
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