| Abstract: |
For centuries, the mathematical aggregation of preferences by groups,
organizations or society has received keen interdisciplinary attention.
Extensive 20th century theoretical work in Economics and Political Science
highlighted that competing notions of “rational social choice” intrinsically
contradict each other. This led some researchers to consider coherent
“democratic decision making” a mathematical impossibility. Recent empirical
work in Psychology qualifies that view. This nontechnical review sketches a
quantitative research paradigm for the behavioral investigation of
mathematical social choice rules on real ballot, experimental choice, or
attitudinal survey data. The paper poses a series of open questions. Some
classical work sometimes makes assumptions about voter preferences that are
descriptively invalid. Do such technical assumptions lead the theory astray?
How can empirical work inform the formulation of meaningful theoretical
primitives? Classical “impossibility results” leverage the fact that certain
desirable mathematical properties logically cannot hold universally in all
conceivable electorates. Do these properties nonetheless hold in empirical
distributions of preferences? Will future behavioral analyses continue to
contradict the expectations of established theory? Under what conditions and
why do competing consensus methods yield identical outcomes? |