On Voting

What is the proper interpretation of the majority rule when the number of proposals or candidates is greater than two? This problem is first discussed in Aristotle’s Politics. The chapter provides historically informed description of voting rules. When there are more than two alternatives, the most important criteria of reasonability or fairness are the Condorcet criterion, the Borda criterion, and the plurality criterion. Arguably, all the real-life methods of choosing a single alternative or candidate may be seen as realizations or as approximations of, or compromises between, these three competing criteria. The social choice criteria are applied to the institutions of direct democracy. A fourth criterion for democratic choices is proportionality. Unlike the other criteria, proportionality is linked, not only to the problem of multiple alternatives, but also to the problem of the two-stage process of representation. I refute some traditional criticisms of proportionality, and try to show why proportionality is compatible with the use of the Condorcet criterion and hence a majoritarian interpretation of democracy. Ultimately, any attempt to apply the criteria in a mechanical way may produce what I call the meta-paradox of social choice. The important message of social choice results is that there are unavoidable trade-offs: we cannot have all the good things simultaneously. What we need is a substantial political theory which tells us how to navigate through the trade-offs.