Interpreting the Will of the People: A Positive Analysis of Ordinal Preference Aggregation

Abstract

We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferencesthat is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently deploy. Majoritarianism is rare. Instead, people employ rules that place greater weight on compromise options. The classification's fit is excellent, and clustering analysis reveals that it does not omit important rules. We ask whether rules are stable across domains, whether people impute cardinal utility from ordinal ranks, and whether attitudes toward aggregation differ across countries with divergent traditions.

Welfare effects of strategic voting under scoring rules

“…-Concave geometric rules and the Nash rule are very susceptible to manipulation, to the point that Borda or even a convex rule is often better at maximising Rawls/Nash welfare than the rules designed for that purpose. This is an issue because empirical evidence suggests that humans value a mixture of the egalitarian and utilitarian principles, and given a choice will choose a voting rule that strikes a balance between the two [2,9,19]. If these rules fail to deliver in the face of strategic behaviour, the question must be posed: what voting rule should a society choose, if it seeks to strike a balance between utilitarian and egalitarian principles?…”