3 - Social Choice Defended

Summary

The previous chapter details a long-standing debate concerning the field of social choice theory. On one side stands Riker's Liberalism Against Populism, in which the impossibility results are interpreted as proof of the arbitrariness and meaninglessness of populist methods of democratic choice, methods intended to embody a “will of the people” in the actions taken by elected representatives on their behalf. On the other side is a large literature intending to counter these claims by arguing that the impossibility theorems themselves are of little relevance, and perhaps even counterproductive, to the study of democracy. The problem with the theorems, these authors argue, is first that the axioms are unfounded as desiderata of good collective choice procedures, and second, that even if the axioms were well founded, the “impossibility” Arrow predicts is empirically so unlikely to be observed that the theorems themselves are irrelevant.

In this chapter we take up the debate in a more detailed, “claim-by-claim” fashion. In so doing, we argue that the conditions underlying the theorems are in fact both normatively desirable and applicable to many real-world settings. We describe how many of the arguments of scholars who attack social choice theory are based on gross misinterpretations of the meaning of the impossibility results.