Approval voting and Arrow’s impossibility theorem

Francois Maniquet and Philippe Mongin

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 44, issue 3, 519-532

Abstract: Approval voting has attracted considerable attention in voting theory, but it has rarely been investigated in an Arrovian framework of collective preference (”social welfare”) functions and never been connected with Arrow’s impossibility theorem. The article explores these two directions. Assuming that voters have dichotomous preferences, it first characterizes approval voting in terms of its collective preference properties and then shows that these properties become incompatible if the collective preference is also taken to be dichotomous. As approval voting and majority voting happen to share the same collective preference function on the dichotomous domain, the positive result also bears on majority voting, and is seen to extend May’s and Inada’s early findings on this rule. The negative result is a novel and perhaps surprising version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, because the axiomatic inconsistency here stems from the collective preference range, not the individual preference domain. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-014-0847-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Approval voting and arrow's impossibility theorem (2011)
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:sochwe:v:44:y:2015:i:3:p:519-532

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-014-0847-2

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().