Making Democracy Meaningful: Social Choice and the Prospects for Participation

Benjamin Radcliff and Ed Wingenbach

 

The Argument:

 

Within the discipline of political science, social choice theory and democratic theory occupy central but antagonistic roles.  Democratic theory, broadly understood, provides the framework within which much if not most political science research occurs; without some substantive notion of democratic aspirations and possibilities, serious work on democratic regimes, democratization, elections, or any other significant political question engaging contemporary politics could not be formulated adequately.  Social choice, derived from economic theories of rationality, has become a dominant empirical and theoretical method, informing the assumptions and analysis of researchers in all subfields. A brief perusal of the discipline’s prestigious journals confirms both the importance and diverse methodological applications of social choice approaches.

Given their dominance in political science, the antagonism between the two theoretical approaches is as disturbing as it is puzzling.  Social choice theory, particularly the implications of Arrow’s theorem, posits the impossibility of meaningful democratic governance.  To the extent that voting cycles are not merely possible but probable (assuming strategically rational actors), coherent outcomes of any preference aggregation cannot be assured.  It follows, as Riker famously argues, that a minimalist liberalism is the only form of democracy actually practicable.  The implications for democratic theory are dire, since all more robust conceptions of preference aggregation are literally meaningless; citizens can do no more than turn out incumbents they dislike, and even this action is imperfectly applicable.  Democratic theorists have yet to rebut this charge directly, preferring to ignore, evade, or dismiss the findings of social choice.  Only the last demonstrates intellectual honesty, but even the best known of the attempt to prove the irrelevance of social choice to the study of democratic politics (Green and Shapiro’s Pathologies fo Rational Choice) fails to engage the core theoretical difficulties, instead focusing on social choice theory’s failure to produce useful analysis or insightful predictions.  The obvious conclusion is bizarre and troubling: the vast majority of political science research depends upon the theoretical viability of democracy, while the discipline’s most promising methodology is not only inconsistent with but actually antithetical to any meaningful democratic theory.

Our work solves this problem.  Accepting the premises of social choice theory, we show that the major theoretical understandings of democracy not only escape the social choice critique but are, in fact, both consistent with and even implied by the social choice approach.  After first rehearsing the social choice critique and discussing various general ways in which the integrity of the majority principle might survive the attack, we turn to a systematic analysis of some core understandings of democracy.  In turn, we show how a populist liberalism, a modified general will, and participatory democracy may all be defended without rejecting social choice.  These chapters show that robust, populist, participatory democracies render tractable the “pathologies” of democracy predicted by social choice.  We then offer empirical evidence, based on analysis of voter preferences in various U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 1996, indicating that mass voter behavior is more consistent with our arguments about democracy than the pessimistic predictions of social choice theory.  We conclude that political science does not face a crisis of coherence, since democratic theory and social choice need not be seen as antagonistic.

The Market:

 

We expect the book to appeal to a very large market.  Among scholars, the book will be of interest to normative and empirical political theorists (two groups rarely in conversation), researchers using social and rational choice methods, students of elections and voting, and those members of the discipline engaged in or intrigued by the debates about the future direction of political science research.  Among instructors, the book will be extremely useful in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.  The early chapters provide comprehensive and accessible overview of social choice theory, including preference aggregation, Arrow’s theorem, the majority principle, as well as reviewing the major schools in democratic theory and the relationship between empirical and normative political theory.  The later chapters show how these disparate but important approaches may be engaged in productive critical dialogue and extended applied to empirical questions. Thus we appeal to a large and varied cross section of political scientists, students, and libraries.

 

Chapter Outline:

 

1.         Introduction

 

2.         The Social Choice Challenge to Democratic Governance

 

Most discussions of the implications of the voter's paradox for the theoretical integrity of majority rule have argued either (a) that the problem represents a lethal pathology, or (b) that it is a contrived curiosity without relevance to the real world. This chapter assumes that cyclical majorities are both real and relevant, but maintains that the majority principle may still be defended on procedural grounds from a variety of theoretical perspectives.  This chapter provides an overview of the problem, lays put the theoretical conditions necessary to meaningful democratic choice, and discusses the general prospects and criteria for majority rule within a variety of theoretical perspectives. 

 

3.         Liberal Populism: Cycles and Meaningful Elections

 

This chapter examines how the problem of cyclical majorities affects the logical structure of the liberal model of democracy.   We argue that Riker's (1982) defense of liberalism is unsatisfying in that it ultimately depends upon the hope that cycles are not common events. As an alternative solution, we propose that the assumptions of a properly construed liberal model imply conditions that prohibit the occurrence of the voter's paradox.   We show that liberalism continues to survive despite the fact that its internal structure depends upon the transitivity of collective preferences, and that this fact in turn provides a theoretical foundation for pursuing more robust or "populistic" conceptions of democracy.

 

4.         The General Will and Social Choice                 

 

The concept of the General Will has been criticized from a social choice perspective as either tyrannical or empirically unattainable. The argument maintains that Arrow's Theorem and similar impossibility results imply that the General Will is both dangerous and "intellectually absurd." While not denying the relevance of the collective choice literature, this chapter argues that such apocalyptic conclusions are premature, showing that certain theoretical articulations of the general will are consistent with the insights of social choice.

 

5.         A Social Choice Defense of Participation

 

In this chapter we argue that the implications of impossibility theorems are consistent with, and implied by, the logic of the participatory conception of democracy. In this view, the democratic method is justified not because it necessarily produces decisions that are adequate representations of public preferences, but because the participation implicit in the method contributes to the development of human capabilities. Given that the impossibility results derived from the theory of voting thus suggest more, rather than less democracy, they may be viewed as functional rather than pathological.

 

6.         Empirical Evidence: The Consistency of Democratic Governance and Cycles

 

This chapter lends empirical plausibility to the theoretical justifications for the consistency of social choice and substantive democracy.  Economic models of voting typically assume the transitivity of individual level preferences. Other conditions, such as single-peakedness or dichotomization, are also sometimes postulated. Despite the ubiquity of these assumptions, there is a paucity of empirical tests using real world elections with mass electorates. Using CPS data,  we address these issues in the context of U.S. Presidential elections contested by at least three candidates (primaries and general elections) from 1972 to 1984, 1992, and 1996 to examine two issues:

 

a. It is maintained that the traditional assumption of transitivity is empirically plausible, even with a large number of alternatives, and while preferences are predominantly not dichotomous, they do tend to be single-peaked along a traditional ideological dimension.

b.  It is argued that there were clear Condorcet winners in each of the four elections in question, and that in each case collective preferences were ideologically constrained.

 

Thus, the empirical findings support our contention that the structure of mass democracy generates meaningful outcomes reflecting the coherent preferences of the electorate.  Such evidence supports our claim that liberal populism and democratic participation do not lead to arbitrary or tyrannical outcomes, and may even permit something like a measure of the “general will.”

 

7.         Conclusion: Meaningful Mass Democracy