This book offers a comprehensive overview and critique of the most important political and philosophical interpretations of the basic results of social choice, assessing their plausibility and seeking to identify the links between the theory of social choice and the more traditional issues of political theory and philosophy. In this regard, the author eschews a strong methodological commitment or technical formalism; the approach is instead based on the presentation of political facts and illustrated via numerous real-life examples. This allows the reader to get acquainted with the philosophical and political dispute surrounding voting and collective decision-making and its links to social choice theory.

Social choice theory and theories of deliberative discourse have deeply impacted on the way political scientists understand the dynamics of democratic politics and decision-making. Deliberation, Social Choice and Absolutist Democracy addresses the dispute between these competing schools of thought. Deliberative democracy and social choice theorists offer the two dominant and competing conceptions of participation in contemporary democratic theory. With the former holding that theories of discourse tell us that through the democratic process we can arrive at consensus, rational outcomes and even principles of justice, while the latter suggest that fair and equal participation is more likely to lead to instability and irrational outcomes. With an in-depth examination of social choice theory and deliberative democracy, David van Mill: presents two case studies on the American Continental Congress 1774-1789 provides an assessment of the types of institutions that will promote radical democracy and create stable outcomes with the minimum sacrifice of the freedom and equality of participants defends a more radical idea of absolutist democracy, gleaned from the writings of Hobbes, against the claims made in favour of limited constitutional government. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of political theory, particularly those with an interest in democracy and social choice theory.

The Institute Vienna Circle held a conference in Vienna in 2003, Cambridge and Vienna – Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, to commemorate the philosophical and scientific work of Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–1930). This Ramsey conference provided not only historical and biographical perspectives on one of the most gifted thinkers of the Twentieth Century, but also new impulses for further research on at least some of the topics pioneered by Ramsey, whose interest and potential are greater than ever. Ramsey did pioneering work in several fields, practitioners of which rarely know of his important work in other fields: philosophy of logic and theory of language, foundations of mathematics, mathematics, probability theory, methodology of science, philosophy of psychology, and economics. There was a focus on the one topic which was of strongest mutual concern to Ramsey and the Vienna Circle, namely the question of foundations of mathematics, in particular the status of logicism. Although the major scientific connection linking Ramsey with Austria is his work on logic, to which the Vienna Circle dedicated several meetings, certainly the connection which is of greater general interest concerns Ramsey's visits and discussions with Wittgenstein. Ramsey was the only important thinker to actually visit Wittgenstein during his school-teaching career in Puchberg and Ottertal in the 1920s, in Lower Austria; and later, Ramsey was instrumental in getting Wittgenstein positions at Cambridge.

The past thirty years have seen a surge of empirical research into political decision making and the influence of framing effects--the phenomenon that occurs when different but equivalent presentations of a decision problem elicit different judgments or preferences. During the same period, political philosophers have become increasingly interested in democratic theory, particularly in deliberative theories of democracy. Unfortunately, the empirical and philosophical studies of democracy have largely proceeded in isolation from each other. As a result, philosophical treatments of democracy have overlooked recent developments in psychology, while the empirical study of framing effects has ignored much contemporary work in political philosophy. In Framing Democracy, Jamie Terence Kelly bridges this divide by explaining the relevance of framing effects for normative theories of democracy. Employing a behavioral approach, Kelly argues for rejecting the rational actor model of decision making and replacing it with an understanding of choice imported from psychology and social science. After surveying the wide array of theories that go under the name of democratic theory, he argues that a behavioral approach enables a focus on three important concerns: moral reasons for endorsing democracy, feasibility considerations governing particular theories, and implications for institutional design. Finally, Kelly assesses a number of methods for addressing framing effects, including proposals to increase the amount of political speech, mechanisms designed to insulate democratic outcomes from flawed decision making, and programs of public education. The first book to develop a behavioral theory of democracy, Framing Democracy has important insights for democratic theory, the social scientific understanding of political decision making, economics, and legal theory.

This second part of a two-volume set continues to describe economists' efforts to quantify the social decisions people necessarily make and the philosophies that those choices define. Contributors draw on lessons from philosophy, history, and other disciplines, but they ultimately use editor Kenneth Arrow's seminal work on social choice as a jumping-off point for discussing ways to incentivize, punish, and distribute goods. - Develops many subjects from Volume 1 (2002) while introducing new themes in welfare economics and social choice theory - Features four sections: Foundations, Developments of the Basic Arrovian Schemes, Fairness and Rights, and Voting and Manipulation - Appeals to readers who seek introductions to writings on human well-being and collective decision-making - Presents a spectrum of material, from initial insights and basic functions to important variations on basic schemes

Kotaro Suzumura is one of the world’s foremost thinkers in social choice theory and welfare economics. Bringing together essays that have become classics in the field, Choice, Preferences, and Procedures examines foundational issues of normative economics and collective decision making. Social choice theory seeks to critically assess and rationally design economic mechanisms for improving human life. An important part of Suzumura’s contribution over the past forty years has entailed fusion of abstract microeconomic ideas with an understanding of real-world economies in a coherent analysis. This volume of selected essays reveals the evolution of Suzumura’s thinking over his career. Groundbreaking papers explore the nature of individual and social choice and the idea of assigning value to freedom of choice, different forms of rationality, and concepts of individual rights, equity, and fairness. Suzumura elucidates his innovative approach for recognizing interpersonal comparisons in the vein of Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and expounds the effect of paying due attention to nonconsequential features, such as the opportunity to choose and the procedure for decision making, along with the standard consequential features. Analyzing the role of economic competition, Suzumura points out how restricting competition may, in some circumstances, improve social welfare. This is not to recommend government regulation rather than market competition but to emphasize the importance of procedural features in a competitive context. He concludes with illuminating essays on the history of economic thought, focusing on the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto, Arthur Pigou, John Hicks, and Paul Samuelson.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's first great book, now reissued in a fully revised and expanded second edition 'Can the values which individual members of society attach to different alternatives be aggregated into values for society as a whole, in a way that is both fair and theoretically sound? Is the majority principle a workable rule for making decisions? How should income inequality be measured? When and how can we compare the distribution of welfare in different societies?' These questions, from the citation by the Swedish Academy of Sciences when Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, refer to his work in Collective Choice and Social Welfare, the most important of all his early books. Originally published in 1970, this classic work in welfare economics has been recognized for its ground-breaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice, including aggregative assessment. It has also had a large influence on international organizations, including the United Nations, particularly in its work on human development. In its original version, the book showed that the 'impossibility theorems' in social choice theory-led by the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow-need not be seen as destructive of the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice. Sen's ideas about social choice, welfare economics, inequality, poverty and human rights have continued to evolve since the book's first appearance. This expanded edition, which begins by reproducing the 1970 edition in its entirety, goes on to present eleven new chapters of new arguments and results. As in the original version, the new chapters alternate between non-mathematical chapters completely accessible to all, and those which present mathematical arguments and proofs. The reader who prefers to shun mathematics can follow all the non-mathematical chapters on their own, to receive a full, informal understanding. There is also a substantial new introduction which gives a superb overview of the whole subject of social choice.

This volume continues the discussion of the Dutch project of “improving democracy” of Munich Social Science Review (MSSR), Volume 3, and the theoretical and empirical analysis of the issue of democracy in general. It concludes with four shorter contributions discussing Katharina Kohl’s art work “Questioning the Personnel” (Personalbefragung) which, as pointed out by Claudia Postel, “refers to the relations of power in democracy. ...Through Katharina Kohl’s work, the NSU murder series and the collective failure of the institutions responsible for safeguarding democracy and its citizens have been rescued from oblivion to serve as a means of education and enlightenment – in the sense of strategic decisions for a future-orientated change management.” Dieser Band setzt die Diskussion des niederländischen Projekts, die „Demokratie zu verbessern“, aus Volume 3 der Munich Social Science Review (MSSR) fort und liefert einen generellen Beitrag zur theoretischen Analyse der Demokratie und demokratischer Institutionen. Er schließt mit vier kürzeren Artikeln zu Katherina Kohls künstlerischer Arbeit „Personalbefragung“. Diese Arbeit, so führt Claudia Postel in ihrem Artikel aus, „bezieht sich auf Machtbeziehungen in der Demokratie...Durch Katharina Kohls Arbeit, wird die NSU-Mordserie und das kollektive Versagen der Institutionen, die die Demokratie und die Bürger schützen sollten, vor dem Vergessen bewahrt, um so der Bewusstseinsmachung und der Aufklärung dienen zu können.

This ground-breaking book examines the relationship between the complexity of political institutions and the stability of socially effective outcomes in more than 40 countries. - ;The role of institutions is to establish the domains of public activity and the rules to select leaders. Democratic regimes organized in simple institutional frameworks to foster the concentration of power and alternative successive absolute winners and losers. They favour political satisfaction of relatively small groups, as well as policy instability. In contrast, pluralistic institutions produce multiple winners, including multiparty co-operation and agreements. They favour stable, moderate, and consensual policies that can satisfy large groups' interests on a great number of issues. The more complex the political institutions, the more stable and socially efficient the outcome will be. This book develops an extensive analysis of this relationship. It explores concepts, questions and insights based on social choice theory, while empirical focus is cast on more than 40 democratic countries and a few international organizations from late medieval times to the present. The book argues that pluralistic democratic institutions are better than simple formulas for their higher capacity of producing socially satisfactory results. -