Empirical social choice: an introduction

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its empirical applications. Special attention is given to three phenomena and their possible empirical manifestations: The instability of social choice in the form of (1) the possibility of majority cycles, (2) the non-robustness of social choices given alternative voting methods, and (3) the possibility of various forms of manipulation of the decisions (heresthetics). These topics are then connected to the contributions to the current special issue.     

Chav-spotting in Britain: the representation of social class as private choice

The word chav is a relatively new one in British English, used to describe a supposed social group defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a young person of a type characterised by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes … usually with connotations of a low social status”. Discourse on chavs in contemporary Britain has been widely implicated in the reinforcement of social inequalities. This article argues that a central element of such discourse is the representation of “everyday” British public experience as a practice of chav-spotting, of reading materials as signs of the private characteristics of those with which they are associated. This means reading class as a privately motivated phenomenon, as the product of the “choice incompetence” of chavs. This chav-spotting practice is viewed from two perspectives: (1) as a recontextualisation of class as the result of private choice; and (2) as a practice of sign-making by which meanings are articulated for publicly observable materials in accordance with (1).     

Determining the classics in social choice

Determination of classic papers and books in any field is of interest and importance to scholars and others interested in the subject areas. Since social/public choice is such a rapidly growing field of increasing importance it seems particularly relevant that we pay tribute to the founders. One means of doing this is to analyze citations to their most important works. This process allows us to simultaneously observe the depth and breadth to which the seminal ideas in the sub-discipline have penetrated the world of social science scholarship. My methodology produces somewhat different results than those reported in the 1981 Public Choice paper by Downing and Stafford. This is not to say that their method is inferior, but that different methods produce differing results which provide readers with a wider range of information about important works in social choice.This paper was considerably improved by comments from Jay Shogren.     

Constitutional law in social choice perspective

Constitutional scholars do not typically employ spatial reasoning in their work. And yet, constitutional jurisprudence and much work in judicial politics implicitly rest on assumptions best cast in spatial terms. These include assuming that positions in constitutional disputes, and the views of Supreme Court justices, generally lie along a common liberal-to-conservative ideological dimension. Although the single dimension assumption is often appropriate, it suffers inherent limitations. First, Supreme Court decision-making rules, both within and across cases, expose problems of dimensionality. Second, important substantive doctrines likewise reveal dimensionality. Third, and finally, throughout the Supreme Court’s history, positions deemed liberal (or conservative) in one period have emerged as conservative (or liberal) in a later period, suggesting that dimensionality is a persistent feature in our jurisprudential history. Social choice proves uniquely suited to explaining these important aspects of constitutional law. After briefly introducing the discipline of constitutional law and its relationship to social choice, this article offers three illustrations of how social choice analysis deepens our understanding of important substantive areas. The analysis exposes dimensionality within Supreme Court decision-making rules, within separation-of-powers doctrine, and over historical shifts in the liberal and conservative valence of once-prominent jurisprudential positions. Failing to appreciate dimensionality, which lies at the core of social choice theory, when studying the Supreme Court and constitutional law risks a truly one-dimensional understanding of a richer and multidimensional institution and body of doctrine.     

Rank injustice?: How the scoring method for cross-country running competitions violates major social choice principles

The scoring method used by high schools and colleges in the U.S. to determine which team wins a cross-country meet can violate a major social choice principle, referred to here as Independence from Irrelevant Teams: whether team A is scored as defeating or losing to team B can depend on whether team C’s performance is included in the calculations. In addition, if a three-way meet is scored as three dual meets, the scoring method can produce a cycle, thereby violating the principle of Transitivity: team A beats team B, team B beats team C, but team C beats team A. Real-world violations of Independence and Transitivity are reported from a high school cross-country meet held in Michigan in the U.S. in 2003. Several results are presented about the conditions under which these two principles can be violated. An alternative scoring method that will violate neither Independence nor Transitivity is also discussed and evaluated.     

The Condorcet-Jefferson connection and the origins of social choice theory

This paper explores the relationship between Condorcet and Jefferson to gain insight into the early development of social choice theory. Jefferson does not seem to have read or understood Condorcet's theoretical work, but studying the relationship leads to the identification of intellectual intermediaries and a different perspective on the creation of social choice theory in the French Academy of Sciences.     

《老子》思想中的和谐与无为

<老子>书中蕴涵了和谐以及无为的思想,二者关系紧密.道的目的是为生成一团和气,无为乃大道施为的方式.大道的和谐就要行无为,也只有无为才可达到大道的和谐.<老子>思想源远流长,至今仍为当代社会的发展提供有益借鉴.     

Communicating corporate social responsibility: an exploratory case study of a major UK retail centre

• Corporate 'social responsibility [CSR] is neither a fad nor an optional extra. The interest in it is reflective of a deeper change in the relationship between companies and their stakeholders. Healthy business requires a healthy community, and should be contributing to its creation and maintenance. The public increasingly wants to know about companies that stand behind the brands and products presented to them. And use their power to reward ‘good’ companies and punish the ‘bad’ ones. (Lewis, S. 2001 ).
• CSR is becoming ever more important in the modern business environment, as is evident by the fact that most leading public companies include a specific statement on their CSR policy within their annual reports. Indeed, changing societal expectations, increasingly intrusive media reporting, and ever more sophisticated and powerful pressure groups have caused all organizations to consider more carefully their wider social responsibilities not only out of altruistic reasons, but because of the need to consider the potential impact of their policies on their wider stakeholder relationships.
• It is argued in academic and professional writing that CSR orientated organizations benefit from a series of tangible and intangible benefits, when stakeholders are informed of their orientation. Corporations have reacted to these calls and this belief in a business case and are implementing CSR programmes or corporate change to bring about new corporate mindsets, and are in‐turn communicating the results of these programmes. However, in order to be able to effectively communicate it is necessary that organizations clearly understand the concept of CSR, both from a managerial perspective and homogeneous and individual stakeholder perspective.
• Aiming to help address this lack of understanding, the proposed paper provides a case examination of stakeholder and management perspectives of CSR in the North West of England in a retail setting. The study was conducted in 2003 around a Major UK retail centre using a mix method approach that drew out management cognate viewpoints on CSR and quantitatively tested these findings against stakeholder viewpoints on CSR. The study is served as a pilot for future studies into the area.
• It found that within the context of the case that the managers and stakeholders (when taken as one homogeneous group) shared a similar view of the concept of CSR. Additionally, the weaknesses of the research pilot brought to the surface methodological improvements that could impact on future researches into the area.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public choice and political philosophy: Reflections on the works of Gordon Spinoza and David Immanuel Buchanan

The paper explores some of the surprisingly many relations between theories of public choice and political philosophy. Focusing on variants of Homo oeconomicus it does so systematically rather than historically. But it factors in the history of the two disciplines along with some recent developments in (experimental) economics. This sheds new light on the counterfactual assumption that in politics everybody should be supposed to be a knave and suggests that we better seek factually sound behavioral foundations for Public Choice.     

The social logic of political choice: Picking a political party in the context of immediate social circles

The Social Logic of Politics places social learning at the center of political choice. People develop their political preferences, knowledge, values, perceptions of ability, and decisions about political behavior in interactions with others, usually members of their social circles. Political attitudes and goals are not derivatives of exogenous economic preferences. They are not the results of careful calculations, in which optimization of personal needs guides the mode of reasoning. This theoretical stance draws sustenance from recent work across the social science, even as it harkens back to established, if neglected principles of political analysis. My thanks to Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck for his encouragement and for the critical comments of several anonymous referees and to Josip Dasović and Jennifer Fitzgerald, my co-authors of Partisan Families: the Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany and Britain (Zuckerman et al. 2007). Material from that book appears in this essay.     

A linear inequality method of establishing certain social choice conjectures

This paper demonstrates the equivalence between sets of linear inequalities and a variety of social choice problems, a fact which permits the solution of the problems using linear programming techniques. An important advantage of this approach is that the primal solution of the linear programming problem, if one exists, provides a specific example illustrating the social choice conjecture under consideration. Examples illustrating this approach to several standard types of social choice problems are presented. Social choice theory relies heavily on demonstrations that various social choice functions can disagree with one another or that these functions are inconsistent with one or more fundamental conditions or axioms held to be desirable properties of a method of deriving a “fair and reasonable” social choice from a set of individual preference orderings. A large class of such conjectures can be shown to be equivalent to systems of linear inequalities. This equivalence makes it possible to establish the truth or falsehood of such social choice conjectures by testing the systems for consistency or by employing one of the many available algorithms to solve the corresponding linear programs. We will give below a number of examples of conjectures resolved in this fashion, but first we must show how the appropriate inequality systems and linear programs may be found.