Constitutional Choice and Majority Voting

Abstract

The theory of rational individual decision-making under certainty goes back to the early marginalists writers, most notably Walras and Jevons. And today it has reached a stage of development which makes it one of the most eleborate piece of economic analysis. By contrast the theory of rational collective decision-making is still in a state of infancy and some would even argue that it is one of the best example of the ‘empty boxes’ of economic theory. This unusual lag in the theory is even more surprising when we consider the fact that it started one hundred years before marginalism: in fact what is now labelled the ‘paradox of voting’ goes back to, at least, Condorcet’s famous essay on probability theory and plurality voting (1785), and in turn, his work seems to have been partly inspired by that of J. C. Borda (1781). There would be no need to stir these old ashes were it not for the fact that one may genuinely wonder why, after almost two centuries of attention, the theory of collective decision-making is still so much underdeveloped. Such a statement will no doubt create some controversy especially among those who have studied this area. It is clear that we recognize the contributions of, say, Arrow and his followers but what we have in mind is somewhat different. The truth of the matter is that Arrow’s celebrated result is purely negative and it appears that the most significant results in the field of social choice share this pessimistic flavor.