Interpretations

This chapter provides a historical review of the various interpretations of the social-choice results the most influential interpretation is the one formulated by William Riker. According to it, the social-choice theory actually shows that the “populist” interpretation of democracy is internally inconsistent, so “liberalism” remains as the only viable alternative. Riker’s arguments are dissected one by one. Riker is quite correct when insisting that an institution-free notion of collective choice does not make sense. However, it is argued that it is mistaken to equate all constraints and structures with “manipulation” or “arbitrariness”. One widely discussed variant of “populism” is based on an epistemic interpretation of democracy. Here it is argued that neither the epistemic views based on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem nor the versions relying on the epistemic virtues of collective deliberation are able to justify democratic equality. Epistemic populists and deliberative democrats interpret voting acts as expressions of judgments rather than preferences. Under this interpretation, voters are assessing the truth or falsity of some propositions. Philip Pettit and Christian List have shown that the paradoxes of social choice persist even after the redefinition. Their results show that even when all voters are rational this sense, collectives may accept inconsistent or incomplete sets of propositions. Pettit argues that these results support his republican conception of democracy. The arguments of Pettit are compared arguments with those of Riker.