comp2 Flashcards
What kind of institutions should we adopt given the
opportunity to change existing institutions, or create new ones?
- Ones that produces good outcomes
- Ones that are good, fair, or just, in and of themselves
While the typical assumption is that a dictatorial decision-making process is inherently unfair, and a democratic one is inherently fair, the analysis by CGG shows that there is –
no perfect decision-making process.
* There are trade-offs in institutional choice making which explains why we have many types of democracies worldwide
Democracy is fundamentally a system in which
majority rules
There are more than two alternatives so they use
round-robin tournament
Rational
according to political scientists, an actor is rational if
they have a complete and transitive preference ordering over a set of outcomes
Condorcet’s paradox
When rational individuals form a group that behaves irrationally ( the example of the city councilors)
1. Each of the councilors is rational because each has a complete and transitive preference ordering over the three policy alternatives. The round-robin tournament, however, shows that these rational individuals act like an individual with intransitive preferences when they are in a group,
2. A different majority supports the winning alternative or outcome in each round
– shows that individual rationality does not ensure group rationality
* When there is no “majority” , there is a cycle of different majorities
Condorcet’s paradox
Why we do not see groups caught up in endless cycles
- Preference orderings
- Decision making rules
Condorcet winner (stable outcome) -
An option that beats all other options in a series of pair-wise contests
Majority rule is not necessarily incompatible with –. What Condorcet shows is that –
rational group preferences, it is possible for a group of individuals with transitive preferences to produce a group with intransitive preferences
As the number of voters increases to infinity, the group intransitivity probability –. This is an important finding because many political decisions are made from an infinite number of options
converges to one, even with a small group of voters
Condorcet’s paradox shows that –
there is no guarantee that a group will demonstrate rational tendencies even if group decision making is restricted to sets of rational individuals
It is impossible to say the majority “decides” except in –
very restricted circumstances
The reason we see a surprising amount of stability in group decision making in the real world is
- The number of decision makers or issues is kept small and the kinds of preferences that produce group intransitivity are rare
- A decision-making mechanism apart from the pair-wise comparison of alternatives is being used
Majority Rule With Agenda Setter
A decision-making mechanism that requires actors to begin by first considering a subset of the available pair-wise alternatives overcomes the potential instability of majority rule in round-robin alternatives
where both types of departure from the status quo (increase and decrease in social service spending) first compete in a pair-wise contest, followed by the winner having a pair-wise vote contest with the status quo. This prescribed sequence of votes is known as a -
voting agenda
Strategic or sophisticated vote
where an individual votes for a less preferred option with the believe that this will produce a more preferred outcome than would otherwise be the case
Alternative voting agenda
can lead to different outcomes even if the preferences of all actors are held constant
Power of the agenda setter
the council member given the power to set the agenda has the power to :-
* Dictate the decision-making process outcome
* Determine the set of available options that can be voted on to begin with
Restriction on Preferences : The Median
Voter Theorem
Institutional factors that restrict the agenda may produce stable outcomes, but at the cost of creating incentives for actors to manipulate the decision-making process
-Presenting the right-wing councilors preference using a utility function which is numerical scale in which numbers represent higher positions in an individual’s preference ordering
Medium Voter Theorem (MVT)
- One of the most important outcomes in single-issue politicalscience
- States that no alternative beats the one preferred by the median voter in pair-wise majority-rule elections if:-
the number of voters is odd
the voter preferences are single peaked over a single –policy dimension, and
voters vote sincerely
When voters are arrayed along a single-issue dimension in terms of their ideal points, the median voter has–
half of the voters to their left and to their right
The medium theorem shows that the problems encountered with Condorcet’s paradox earlier, like group intransitivity and cyclical majorities, can be -
avoided if we rule certain preference orderings
“out of bounds” and we shrink the policy space to a single issue dimension. This restriction to a single-issue policy is controversial because of the multidimensional nature of many political questions
The – shows that there is no stable outcome when there is more than one issue dimension and three or more voters with preferences in the issue space vote sincerely by majority rule ( McKelvey 1976; Plott 1967;Schofield 1978) except in the case of a rare distribution of ideal points
chaos theorem
