Empirical social choice: an introduction

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.Keywords: Social choice; Condorcet's Paradox; voting theory; voting paradoxes; preferences; heresthetics.[Even] if an omniscient observer, call him Zeus, knew the true tastes of every voter, it would still be impossible for him to predict the social choice or the product of aggregating preferences unless he also knew the method of aggregation. This means that the social choice depends not simply on the wills of individuals, but also on the method used to summarize these wills.

A generalized Hotelling–Downs model with asymmetric candidates

“…Empirical examples of cyclical preferences over alternatives and of the Condorcet paradox have been detected in real‐world situations through different studies. One example is the work by Kurrild‐Klitgaard (2001) about a poll on the preferred prime minister by Danish voters in 1994. In this study, by pairwise comparison between three candidates, the author shows that voters have a cyclical preference over candidates.…”