Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections.

[1]  J. Ravetz.  Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems , 2020 .

[2]  B. Frey,et al.  Working Paper No . 15 Happiness , Economy and Institutions , 1999 .

[3]  D. J. Montgomery,et al.  The Organization Of Inquiry , 1967 .

[4]  J. Rawls.  Justice as Fairness , 2001 .

[5]  D. Saari.  Decisions and elections : explaining the unexpected , 2001 .

[6]  L. A. Goodman,et al.  Social Choice and Individual Values , 1951 .

[7]  Otis Dudley Duncan,et al.  Notes on Social Measurement: Historical and Critical. , 1986 .

[8]  Peter C. Fishburn,et al.  The responsiveness of approval voting: Comments on Saari and Van Newenhizen , 1988 .

[9]  B. Frey,et al.  Happiness, Economy and Institutions , 2000, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[10]  Steven J. Brams,et al.  Voter Sovereignty and Election Outcomes , 2003 .

[11]  Arnold B. Urken,et al.  Classics of social choice , 1995 .

[12]  D. Saari.  Basic Geometry of Voting , 1995 .

[13]  G. Tullock.  Problems of Voting , 2005 .

[14]  J. Harsanyi.  Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility , 1955 .

[15]  M. Fleming,et al.  A Cardinal Concept of Welfare , 1952 .

[16]  D. Saari.  Geometry of voting , 1994 .

[17]  D. Saari,et al.  The problem of indeterminacy in approval, multiple, and truncated voting systems , 1988 .

[18]  K. Arrow,et al.  Social Choice and Individual Values , 1951 .

[19]  Enid Lakeman.  How democracies vote , 1970 .

[20]  Lee Spector,et al.  Would the Borda Count Have Avoided the Civil War? , 1999 .

[21]  R. Dawes.  Fundamentals of attitude measurement , 1972 .

[22]  C. Hillinger.  The Money Metric, Price and Quantity Aggregation and Welfare Measurement , 2003 .

[23]  S. Brams.  Voter Sovereignty and Election Outcomes 1 , 2003 .

[24]  Geoffrey Brennan,et al.  Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference , 1997 .

[25]  D. Mueller.  Public Choice III: What have we learned? , 1979 .

[26]  Dan S. Felsenthal,et al.  On combining approval with disapproval voting , 1989 .

[27]  J. Harsanyi.  Rational behavior and bargaining equilibrium in games and social situations: Frontmatter , 1977 .