The Underlying Assumptions of Electoral Systems

Abstract

My aim in this brief paper is modest: not to present new findings, but to propose what I regard as a useful way of classifying voting procedures, and thus organizing the way we look at them. My main thesis is that we have to make a strict distinction between two kinds of consideration in choosing a voting/election procedure: Political criteria. I use this rubric in a very broad sense, including criteria ranging 9 from the pragmatic to the philosophical. But all of them are purely a matter of 10 opinion, not of “right” or “wrong”. 11 • Social-choice considerations. I take this rubric in the narrow sense: the logico- 12 mathematical properties of a voting procedure, the pathologies and paradoxes 13 that afflict it.