Social Choice in the Real World

Eerik Lagerspetz
Additional contact information
Eerik Lagerspetz: University of Turku

Chapter Chapter 7 in Social Choice and Democratic Values, 2016, pp 383-430 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter begins by assessing the empirical evidence about the social choice paradoxes, especially the evidence about the Condorcet Paradox. I discuss briefly the possible reasons of the paucity of the empirical evidence. Then, I compare two real-life political institutions: the traditional Finnish presidential election system, which was in use from 1925 to 1988, and its US-American counterpart. For several reasons, the two Electoral Colleges provide an interesting subject for applied social choice. By using historical sources I try to show that the history of the Finnish Electoral College exhibits two, perhaps three instances of the Condorcet paradox, and provides dramatic examples of the effects of strategic voting. In contrast, in the US Electoral College there are no instances of the Condorcet paradox, for the unit-rule version of plurality tends to produce unambiguous majorities. This is acquired at a cost: the US system of electing the College violates the Arrovian independence and path-independence conditions far more often than the proportional Finnish system. For this reason, the connection between the distribution of the popular vote and the composition of the College is very weak. Both the US and the Finnish system may exhibit quasi-chaotic behaviour—“chaotic” in the sense that very small, unpredictable perturbations may sometimes change the outcome. This is one consequence of Arrow’s theorem.

Keywords: Social Choice; Presidential Election; Condorcet Winner; Strategic Vote; Electoral College (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-319-23261-4_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319232614

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-23261-4_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Choice and Welfare from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().