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Collective Choice (collective + choice)
Selected AbstractsINSPECTING THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISMECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2010Anthony De Jasay Liberal justice is rooted in a system of conventions. They arise spontaneously as behavioural equilibria that bring mutual advantage to those adopting them. They protect life, limb, property and the pursuit of peaceful purposes, and require the fulfilment of reciprocal promises. Collective choice, where some impose choices on others who submit, violates liberal justice and reduces the set of freedoms. Liberalism and democracy are incompatible as organising principles and ,liberal democracy' is a contradiction in terms. [source] Urban Regime Theory: A Normative-Empirical CritiqueJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2002Jonathan S. Davies Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory of structuring with limits in its analysis of the market economy. These limits undermine its ability to explain the importance of political agency,the scope of individual or collective choice in political decisions and the impact of those choices in the evolution of US cities. It is further argued that there are important normative dimensions to urban regime theory, most fully articulated in Elkin's commercial republic, which academic commentaries have not acknowledged. However, the empirical analysis developed in regime theory contradicts its normative objectives. The absence of a conceptualization of market dynamics, in the light of pessimism about the prospects for equitable regime governance, not only limits it as a theory of structuring but it also renders it unable to explain how the commercial republic can be realized. Regime theory is, therefore, unconvincing for two reasons. It cannot explain how much local politics matter, and it fails to demonstrate that its normative goal,more equitable regime governance,can be achieved, given the realities of the US market economy. Regime theory needs a more developed understanding of structuring. It may be fruitful, therefore, for regime theorists to re-engage critically with variants of Marxism, which unlike Structuralism, recognize the possibility of agency. [source] Is Rule by Majorities Special?POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 1 2010Hugh Ward One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue-by-issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy-proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue-by-issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered. [source] When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertaintyQUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2010Charles F. Manski D7; D81; H42 Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which an efficiency argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision making when each member of a population has the same objective function, which depends on an unknown state of nature. If agents knew the state of nature, they would make the same decision. However, they may have different beliefs or may use different decision criteria to cope with their incomplete knowledge. Hence, they may choose different actions even though they share the same objective. Let the set of feasible actions be convex and the objective function be concave in actions, for all states of nature. Then Jensen's inequality implies that consensus choice of the mean privately chosen action yields a larger mean payoff than does individualistic decision making, in all states of nature. If payoffs are transferable, the mean payoff from consensus choice may be allocated to Pareto dominate individualistic decision making. I develop these ideas. I also use Jensen's inequality to show that a planner with the power to assign actions to the members of the population should not diversify. Finally, I give a version of the collective-choice result that holds with consensus choice of the median rather than mean action. [source] | ||||||||||