Did Jefferson or Madison understand Condorcet's theory of social choice?

McLean, Iain; Urken, Arnold B.

doi:10.1007/bf01789561

Cited by 57 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Plurality voting is still universally used and theorists do not agree on the superiority of any other method. McLean and Urken (1995), in their review of social choice theory reach the following conclusion.…”

Section: Second Paradoxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Science and Ideology in Economic, Political and Social Thought

Hillinger

2006

SSRN Journal

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Section: Second Paradoxmentioning

confidence: 99%

Science and Ideology in Economic, Political and Social Thought

Hillinger

2006

SSRN Journal

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“…This phenomenon has been known for centuries. In fact, awareness of the problem has affected practical politics, from Pliny the Younger 7 s manipulation of the sentencing agenda in the case of the murdered consul Afranius Dexter (Farquharson 1969) to tantalizing speculations that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison may have been influenced by Condorcet's work on social choice in their views of governmental structure (McLean and Urken 1992;Miller and Hammond 1989). 2 Of course, the various impossibility theorems about group choice suggest not that Condorcet winners never exist, but only that they are not guaran-teed.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Condorcet Winners and the Paradox of Voting: Probability Calculations for Weak Preference Orders

et al. 1995

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That individual preferences may he aggregated into a meaningful collective decision using the Condorcet criterion of majority choice is one of the central tenets of democracy. But that individual preferences may not yield majority winners is one of the classic findings of the social choice literature. Given this problem, social choice theorists have attempted to estimate the probability of Condorcet winners, given certain empirical or theoretical conditions. We shall estimate the probabilities of Condorcet winners and intransitive aggregate orders for various numbers of individuals with strong or weak preference orders across various numbers of alternatives. We find, using computer simulation, a stark contrast between these estimates assuming strong individual preferences and the estimates allowing for individuals' indifference between pairs of alternatives. In contrast to earlier work, which depends on the strong-preference assumption, we suggest that the problem is most acute for small committee decision making and least acute for mass elections with few alternatives.

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“…This is the classical Condorcet paradox (McLean and Urken, 1995). Observe how, when we interpret p a b as 'I consider a being preferable over b' and so forth, we get the first group of formulas above to encode the fact that our preference order should be complete and antisymmetric, while the second group expresses that it should be transitive.…”

Section: An Example: Simulating the Condorcet Paradoxmentioning

confidence: 99%