Collective Decision-Making: Social Choice and Political Economy
Author: Norman Schofield
Published by Springer Netherlands
ISBN: 978-90-481-5800-3
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8767-9

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Research Programs in Preference and Belief Aggregation
An Introduction to Arrovian Social Welfare Functions on Economic and Political Domains
Social Ranking of Allocations with and without Coalition Formation
Non Binary Social Choice: A Brief Introduction
Election Relations and a Partial Ordering for Positional Voting
Electing Legislatures
Preference-Based Stability: Experiments on Cooperative Solutions to Majority Rule Games
The Heart of a Polity
Refinements of the Heart
Bargaining in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan
An Analysis of the Euskarian Parliament
Extending a Dynamic Model of Protocoalition Formation
The Sequential Dynamics of Cabinet Formation, Stochastic Error, and a Test of Competing Models
Subgame-Perfect Portfolio Allocations in Parliamentary Government Formation
The Costs of Coalition: The Italian Anomaly
Models of Interest Groups: Four Different Approaches
Partisan Electoral Cycles and Monetary Policy Games
Hypothesis Testing and Collective Decision-Making
Political Discourse, Factions, and the General Will: Correlated Voting and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem

This volume is intended to provide a broad perspective on collective decision-making, presenting economic and political aspects from both a theoretical and empirical viewpoint. The four chapters in the first section of the book give new results in Social Choice Theory, showing how the Arrow Impossibility Theorem applies in both economic and political decisions, and analyzing generalized Borda voting methods. The second section examines elections and committees, by setting up a formal approach to study the election of a legislature by presenting new experimental work on voting in committees, and by outlining a unified theory of political choice. The third section examines decision-making in multiparty politics (including detailed theoretical and empirical study of a number of democracies). The fourth section on political economy covers interest groups, electoral cycles and a formal discussion of the `general will'. We need to understand all the properties of coalitions and coalition-formation in order to appreciate and interpret politics ... This volume summarizes what we have learned. - from the Foreword by William Riker
1 Introduction: Research Programs in Preference and Belief Aggregation -- I. Social Choice -- 2 An Introduction to Arrovian Social Welfare Functions on Economic and Political Domains -- 3 Social Ranking of Allocations with and without Coalition Formation -- 4 Non Binary Social Choice: A Brief Introduction -- 5 Election Relations and a Partial Ordering for Positional Voting -- II. Elections and Committees -- 6 Electing Legislatures -- 7 Preference-Based Stability: Experiments on Cooperative Solutions to Majority Rule Games -- 8 The Heart of a Polity -- 9 Refinements of the Heart -- III. Coalition Governments -- 10 Bargaining in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan -- 11 An Analysis of the Euskarian Parliament -- 12 Extending a Dynamic Model of Protocoalition Formation -- 13 The Sequential Dynamics of Cabinet Formation, Stochastic Error, and a Test of Competing Models -- 14 Subgame-Perfect Portfolio Allocations in Parliamentary Government Formation -- 15 The Costs of Coalition: The Italian Anomaly -- IV. Political Economy -- 16 Models of Interest Groups: Four Different Approaches -- 17 Partisan Electoral Cycles and Monetary Policy Games -- 18 Hypothesis Testing and Collective Decision-Making -- 19 Political Discourse, Factions, and the General Will: Correlated Voting and Condorcet's Jury Theorem -- Name Index