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e-Democracy pp 101–123Cite as

Voting Theory

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Part of the book series: Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation ((AGDN,volume 5))

Abstract

The theory of voting has a long and discontinuous history. Currently the theory takes individual preference rankings over alternatives as given and establishes results involving compatibility or incompatibility of various desiderata concerning ways to aggregate individual rankings into social choices or rankings. From the viewpoint of democracy, some of those desiderata are more important than others. We review some of the relevant results in this area. Since the main results are of negative nature, it makes sense to ask whether those results could be avoided if other views were to be adopted regarding the form of individual opinions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is an exclusive “or” we are dealing with here since obviously dictatorial decision functions are not manipulable: the dictator can only lose by misrepresentation and the strategies of other voters are irrelevant for the outcome.

  2. 2.

    The conditions are those of Aizerman and Aleskerov (1995, 236), but I have taken the liberty of naming them.

  3. 3.

    Aizerman and Aleskerov call this the heritage condition.

  4. 4.

    For earlier systems based on group utilities, see Bacharach (1975), Keeney (1976) and Keeney and Kirkwood (1975).

  5. 5.

    This does not make impartial culture simulations worthless. On the contrary they are very useful is assessing the purely procedure-related effects such as how close the winner intuitions of various systems are to each other.

  6. 6.

    Young (1988) argues that this method is in fact the one that Condorcet had in mind in late eighteenth century. Young (1995) shows that Kemeny’s method can be seen as resulting in the maximum likelihood ranking.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Simon French and David Ríos Insua for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland, University of Turku and Turku School of Economics through their support to the Public Choice Research Centre at University of Turku.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Public Choice Research Centre, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

    Hannu Nurmi

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  1. Hannu Nurmi
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Correspondence to Hannu Nurmi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Depto. Informatica, Estadistica, Universitdad Rey Juan Carlos, Tulipan s/n, Mostoles, 28933, Spain

    David Rios Insua

  2. Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Booth Street W., Manchester, M15 6PB, United Kingdom

    Simon French

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Nurmi, H. (2010). Voting Theory. In: Rios Insua, D., French, S. (eds) e-Democracy . Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9045-4_7

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