Institutionalizing Majority Rule: A Social Choice Theory with Policy Implications

Abstract

Recent results in the theory of pure rule demonstrate the genericity of rule cycles. As established by Richard McKelvey (1979), L. Cohen (1979) and N. Schofield (1978), rule nearly always breaks down and, when it does, the breakdown is complete. The theorems given below may be summed up in the following three assertions: 1) For any policy or alternative, there exists a set of alternatives that command a of votes against it; 2) this situation is not an abberation but rather is the general case; and 3) it is almost always possible in multidimensional choice settings to find a sequence of votes that begins at any point and ends at any other point. Majority rule may wander anywhere. Yet, when these theoretical assertions are applied to legislatures based upon rule, they contain no obvious policy content or predictions. The key insight which we elaborate in this paper is that rule is not self-implementing-there is no majority rule machine into which we feed preferences and out of which come outcomes. Rather, there is a complex series of institutional arrangements underpinning the operation of rule legislatures-arrangements from which theorists have (mistakenly) abstracted. In fact, rule theorists have not focused at all on institutional details; instead they have restricted themselves to the rule dominance relation, operating under the implicit assumption that what may be proved true about this relation is true of all legislative institutions based upon it. In this paper, we show that this assumption is misleading and that the the results based upon it must be reinterpreted in order to be useful for understanding real world committees and legislatures.

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