Abstract
Albert Heckscher (1857–1897) was a Danish lawyer. In his dissertation (Bidrag till Grundlæggelse af en Afstemningslære), accepted in 1892 at the University of Copenhagen, Heckscher dealt with numerous issues related to voting, especially those related to vote-aggregation in parliaments, courts and committees. He knew the works of Condorcet and Borda quite well, and analyzed many topics that would nowadays fall into the domain of the theory of social choice. These include Condorcet-cycles, differences between Condorcet-effective rules and the Borda rule, strategic voting, the influence of the voting order under the parliamentary voting rules, the likelihood of single-peaked preference profiles, and the problems created by non-separable preferences. Heckscher’s treatment of the Judgment Aggregation Paradox is especially noteworthy. Although Kornhauser and Sager (Yale Law Journal 96: 82–117, 1986) are usually mentioned as the inventors of this problem, Heckscher’s earlier treatment confirms the suspicion that the problem is not of recent origin. Numerous issues studied in the post-Arrowian theory of voting may already be found in Heckscher’s dissertation; some of them have become subjects of systematic study only in the twenty-first century. It is argued that Albert Heckscher, the unknown nineteenth century Danish lawyer, deserves a place in the pantheon of the theory of social choice alongside his better known contemporaries Charles Dodgson and E. J. Nanson.
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Notes
Not to be confused with the well-known Swedish economist and historian Eli F. Heckscher (1879–1952).
All references in parentheses—unless otherwise indicated—are to Heckscher’s book. All translations are my own.
Here and elsewhere I have slightly modified the notation, but not the content, of Heckscher’s examples.
The writings of Borda, Condorcet and Laplace appear in his bibliography.
I think Farquharson (1969) was the first author working within the modern social choice tradition who distinguished the two methods of parliamentary decision-making.
A recent article by Rasch (2013) confirms Heckscher’s conjecture that strategic voting is rare under the serial (or successive) procedure. Rasch finds only two clear examples of strategic voting from the Norwegian parliamentary records from 1990 to 2011. To quote Rasch: “…under the successive procedure, as long as voting order is specified, no voter can gain by voting for a (single) worst alternative or against a (single) best alternative.”.
Heckscher (1892, p. 112, 151) refers twice to the famous voting problem presented by Pliny the Younger in one of his letters—the text analyzed later by Farquharson in his ground-breaking book (Farquharson 1969). This is not surprising: Pliny’s letter was well known in the earlier jurisprudential tradition (cf. Lagerspetz 1986, p. 181).
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Acknowledgments
The first version of this text was presented in the workshop ‘Power, Games, and Fairness’ at the University of Turku (Finland), 25–26th October 2013, organized by the Public Choice Research Centre. I thank all of the participants, especially Hannu Nurmi, Christian List and Maurice Salles, for their comments. I am also grateful to the editors of this journal and to the anonymous referee for their corrections and suggestions. My research has been supported by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation and by the University of Turku.
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Lagerspetz, E. Albert Heckscher on collective decision-making. Public Choice 159, 327–339 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0169-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0169-z