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William Ricer, was long a professor f political science at the University of Rochester, and his work on social choice and democracy influenced many of his students and colleagues the ere. The Rochester current is heir to a tradition of skepticism against the possibility of democratic politics, most respectably expressed earlier in this century by the economists Parent and Schumacher. In America the skeptical view of democracy is often accompanied by a family of arguments to the effect that “most public sector programs … Are inappropriate, or are carried on at an inappropriate level, or are executed in an inappropriate manner. 4 The normative recommendation that is supposed to follow from these descriptive assertions is that we are best protected from the absurdities of democracy by liberal institutions that, to the maximum extent feasible, shunt decisions from the incoherent democratic forum to the coherent economic market, an d that fragment political power so that modulus elites calculate Ana contest In perpetual Utility; In toner words, Tanat ten U. S.
Constitution, especially as it was interpreted before the New Deal to prevent political interference in the economy, is one of the best of all possible political arrangements. 5 The descriptive assertions against democracy and that normative recommendation are not necessarily linked, however. There are those who grant some credence to the descriptive assertions, yet would pres numbly recommend institutions more social democratic than conservative in content. Others could plausibly argue that f voting and discussion are inaccurate and meaningless, then coercive paternalism is necessarily better than any liberalism for coherent lay shaping and satisfying people’s needs. 7 In his Liberalism against Populism , an interpretation of the results of social choice theory, Ricer makes an apparently powerful case against the very intelligibility of majorities democracy. 8 Because differed t voting systems yield different outcomes from the same profile of individual voters’ preferences, he argues, democracy is inaccurate .
For a simple example, insider that if a group of people is voting for one among three or more candidates for an office, then a voting system that on one ballot selected the candidate with a plurality (the most votes, but not necessarily a majority) might select a different candidate than a system that held a second ballot for a majority runoff between the two top vote get errs from a first ballot. Different methods of aggregating individuals’ fixed choices may yield different group choices.
Next, Ricer continues, given a fixed voting system, then democracy is meaningless : the outcome of voting is manipulate, and it is n to possible to distinguish manipulated from manipulated outcomes because of the inviolability of private intentions underlying public actions. The spirit of the argument is best conveyed by presenting Concrete’s paradox of voting. Suppose that there a re three persons named , and , deciding by majority vote among three alternatives b and that individual preference orders are equivalent to what follows. Table 1 Vote RSI Preferences (left > right)