Approval voting and arrow's impossibility theorem

Philippe Mongin and Francois Maniquet

No 954, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: Author's abstract. Approval voting has attracted considerable interest among voting theorists, but they have rarely investigated it in the Arrovian frame-work of social welfare functions (SWF) and never connected it with Arrow’s impossibility theorem. This note explores these two direc- tions. Assuming that voters have dichotomous preferences, it first characterizes approval voting in terms of its SWF properties and then shows that these properties are incompatible if the social preference is also taken to be dichotomous. The positive result improves on some existing characterizations of approval voting in the literature, as well as on Arrow’s and May’s classic analyses of voting on two alternatives. The negative result corresponds to a novel and perhaps surprising version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem.

Keywords: approval voting; majority voting; collective prefer- ence function; arrow’s impossibility theorem. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2011-11-17
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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Related works:
Journal Article: Approval voting and Arrow’s impossibility theorem (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:0954

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