The mathematical theory of voting has intellectual roots extending back two centuries to the writings of Borda and Condorcet. Yet it has only been in the last forty years that general theorems have begun to emerge. With the publication of this volume, Norman Schofield brings the results together in a ,common framework. SOCIAL CHOICE AND DEMOCRACY, however, is not merely a synthetic exercise, for Schofield's own work over the last decade has constituted a major initiative in deepening and' broadening our general understanding of voting arrangements. At last the results of his research, bits and pieces of which have been reported in a number of journals of international standing and in various collections, are coherently and systematically presented as an entirety. For students of democracy -- chiefly philosophers and political scientists, but increasingly economists as well -- the insights of this volume are profound. From it I infer the following.

Autorentext

Norman Schofield is Director of the Center in Political Economy, the William R. Taussig Professor of Political Economy, and Professor in the Departments of Economics and Political Science. He is currently working on topics in the theory of social choice, political economy, and democracy. In 2003-4 he was the Fulbright distinguished professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and has recently held fellowships at ICER in Turin, and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In Spring 2008 he was the visiting Leitner Professor at Yale University. His earlier books include Multiparty Government (with Michael Laver, in 1990), Social Choice and Democracy (1985), and three co-edited volumes: Political Economy: Institutions, Information, and Representation (1993) ,and Social Choice, Welfare and Ethics (1995), (both with Cambridge University Press), and Collective Decision Making (Kluwer, 1996). His more recent books include Mathematical Methods in Economics and Social Choice ( Springer in 2003). Architects of Political Change (2006), Multiparty Democracy (with Itai Sened, 2006), both with Cambridge University Press, The Spatial Model of Politics (Routledge, 2008), and The Political Economy of Democracy and Tyranny (Oldenbourg. 2009). His book on Leadership or Chaos, with Gallego, includes analyses of elections in Britain, Canada, the US, Turkey, and Russia, and is in press with Springer. A co-edited volume with Caballero is also in press with Springer. He has been the recipient of a number of NSF awards, most recently one on electoral politics and regime change. Maria Gallego is an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Gallego has been concerned with leadership accountability in political economy situations and how the strategic interactions between political and economic agents determine policy outcomes. Using resultsfrom her empirical study of leadership transitions (Canadian Journal of Economics, 1996, and Economics and Politics, 1998) she then developed with Carolyn Pitchik an economic theory of leadership transition (Journal of Public Economics 2004). With Cressman she extended Nash's bargaining model to allow agents to have single peaked rather than increasing preferences over the policy space (Mathematical Social Science 2009). With Scoones she applied this theory to intergovernmental negotiations (Social Choice and Welfare, 2011). More recently, Gallego joined the research project with Schofield and has participated in studying individual elections in various countries. She and Schofield ran a workshop on the Political Economy of Bargaining in April 2008. With Schofield and Kilgour, they co-edited a Special Issue of Social Choice and Welfare on the Political Economy of Elections and Bargaining. Some of the work with Schofield is included in the book on Leadership or Chaos. The book is in press with Springer. Gallego has also visited the Toulouse School of Economics and the Center in Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Inhalt
1: Introduction.- 1.1. Rational Choice.- 1.2. The Theory of Social Choice.- 1.3. Restrictions on the Set of Alternatives.- 1.4. Structural Stability of the Core.- 2: Social Choice.- 2.1. Preference Relations.- 2.2. Social Preference Functions.- 2.3. Arrowian Impossibility Theorems.- 2.4. Power and Rationality.- 2.5. Choice and Functions.- 3: Voting Rules.- 3.1. Simple Binary Preference Functions.- 3.2. Acyclic Voting Rules on Restricted Sets of Alternatives.- 3.3. Manipulation of Choice Functions on Finite Sets of Alternatives.- 3.4. Restrictions on the Preferences of Society.- 4: The Core.- 4.1. Existence of a Choice.- 4.2. Existence of a Core in Low Dimensions.- 4.3. Convex Preferences.- 4.4. Non-Convex Preference.- 4.5. The Necessity of the Dimension Constraint.- 5: Local Cycles.- 5.1. Voting Cycles in Dimension v(?)1.- 5.2. Implementation of Choice Functions in Dimension v(?) 1.- 5.3. Cycles and the Stability Dimension.- 5.4. The Stability Dimension v*( ?).- 6: Structural Stability.- 6.1. Plott Symmetry Conditions.- 6.2. Structural Stability of the Optima Set.- 6.3. Structural Instability of the Optima Set.- 6.4. Stability of the Core and of Cycles.- 7: Classification of Voting Rules.- 7.1. The Stability and Instability Dimensions.- 7.2. Voting Rules in Low Dimensions.- 7.3. Majority Rule with an Infinite Electorate.- 8: Democratic Theory.- 8.1. Liberalism and Populism.- 8.2. Populist Democracy and Institutionalism.- 8.3. Liberal Theory and Electoral Politics.- 8.4. Preferences and Beliefs.- Glossary of Concepts.- Index of Authors.- Index of Terms and Definitions.