Only a Dictatorship is Efficient or Neutral
29 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2007
Date Written: March 29, 2007
Abstract
Social choice theory understands a voting rule as a mapping from preferences over possible outcomes to a specific choice or choices. However, actual election procedures often do not have this structure. Rather, in a typical election, although the outcome is an assembly comprising several people occupying different seats, voters cast their ballots for individual candidates, and these candidates have their votes tallied on a seat-by-seat basis. We prove two theorems: the only efficient seat-by-seat procedure is a dictatorship and the only neutral seat-by-seat procedure is a dictatorship.
Keywords: social choice, voting rules, separable preferences, candidate-based procedures
JEL Classification: D71, D72, K49
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation