Abstract
Democracy has intrinsic value because it pursues the ideals of freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty which legitimate representative government, and it has instrumental value because modern democratic states are also prosperous. Yet, dissatisfaction with the ability of democracy, in the sense of majority rule to determine an electoral winner, to empower citizens and secure their economic well-being seem to be almost permanent. Using intuitions from institutional economics and social choice theory, the paper attributes disappointment with electoral democracy to its foundational design and specifically the process of aggregation of preferences, imperfectly defined voter preferences, imperfect information of voters, the impossibility of a social choice equilibrium, voting for politicians organized in political parties, intra-voter inequality, intra-candidate inequality, and the lack of an ethical meaning in the aggregation of votes.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Power and Responsibility |
Subtitle of host publication | Interdisciplinary Perspectives for the 21st Century in Honor of Manfred J. Holler |
Editors | Martin Leroch, Florian Rupp |
Place of Publication | Cham |
Publisher | Springer |
Pages | 287-304 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISBN (Electronic) | ISBN 978-3-031-23015-8 (eBook) |
ISBN (Print) | ISBN 978-3-031-23014-1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published online - 22 Feb 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Democracy
- Political Institutions
- Voting; Social Choice Equilibrium
- Political Agency; Political inequality;
- Democratic Norms
- Political inequality
- Social choice equilibrium
- Voting
- Democratic norms
- Political agency
- Political institutions