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Empirical social choice: An introduction

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  • Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter

Abstract

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.

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  • Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter, 2014. "Empirical social choice: An introduction," MPRA Paper 53323, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:53323
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    Cited by:

    1. Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter, 2018. "Trump, Condorcet and Borda: Voting paradoxes in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 29-35.
    2. Kurrild-Klitgaard, Peter, 2016. "The cyclical social choice of primary vs. general election candidates: A note on the US 2016 presidential election," MPRA Paper 69171, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Mehdi Feizi & Rasoul Ramezanian & Saeed Malek Sadati, 2020. "Borda paradox in the 2017 Iranian presidential election: empirical evidence from opinion polls," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 21(2), pages 101-113, June.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social choice; Condorcet’s Paradox; voting theory; voting paradoxes; preferences; heresthetics.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B2 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925
    • B3 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals
    • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics
    • D69 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Other
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

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