General concepts of value restriction and preference majority

Regenwetter and Grofman [17] offer a probabilistic generalization of Sen's [25, 27] classic value restriction condition when individual preferences are linear orders. They provide necessary and sufficient conditions for transitive majority preferences on linear orders. They call these conditions net value restriction and net preference majority. We study parallel generalizations for general binary relations. In general, neither net value restriction nor net preference majority is necessary for transitive majority preferences. Net value restriction is sufficient for transitive strict majority preferences, but not sufficient for transitive weak majority preferences. Net majority is sufficient for transitive majorities only if the preference relation with a net majority is a weak order. An application of our results to four U.S. National Election Study data sets reveals, in each case, transitive majorities despite a violation of Sen's original value restriction condition. We thank the National Science Foundation for funding this collaborative research through NSF grants SBR 97-30076 to Regenwetter and SBR 97-30578 to Grofman and Marley. We are indebted to the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) for access to the 1968, 1980, 1992 and 1996 U.S. National Election Study (NES) data. We thank Mark Berger for helping us with the necessary data extraction. We are grateful to the action editor and the referees for extensive and helpful comments. Most of this work was carried out while the first author was a faculty member at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, which has generously supported our collaboration. Marley was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Germany, during the paper's completion.     

The hidden majority/minority consensus: Minorities show similar preference patterns of immigrant support as the majority population

The acceptance of new arrivals has become an important topic regarding the social cohesion of the receiving countries. However, previous studies focused only on the native population's drivers of attitudes towards immigrants, disregarding that immigrant-origin inhabitants now form a considerable part of the population. To test whether the drivers for the willingness to support immigrants are the same for natives and immigrants and their descendants, we rely on a vignette study conducted in a representative German online panel (N = 3149) which contains an overrepresentation of immigrant-origin respondents. We presented participants with three vignettes of potential immigrants, varying, amongst other factors, economic prospects, safe and war-ridden countries of origin (to capture deservingness), as well as religious identity. While we find that minority members are generally slightly more welcoming towards immigrants than majority members, at their core are the same factors that drive attitudes to immigrants in both groups: economic cost, cultural similarity, and deservingness. However, we observe differences at the margins: Immigrant-origin respondents take into account economic prospects to a lesser degree than majority members do, and by trend, they are less likely to distinguish between immigrants from war-ridden and safe countries of origin. Furthermore, we can show that the preference for immigrants with the same religious identities not only occurs among majority members but also among minority members.     

On the probabilities of correct or incorrect majority preference relations

While majority cycles may pose a threat to democratic decision making, actual decisions based inadvertently upon an incorrect majority preference relation may be far more expensive to society. We study majority rule both in a statistical sampling and a Bayesian inference framework. Based on any given paired comparison probabilities or ranking probabilities in a population (i.e., culture) of reference, we derive upper and lower bounds on the probability of a correct or incorrect majority social welfare relation in a random sample (with replacement). We also present upper and lower bounds on the probabilities of majority preference relations in the population given a sample, using Bayesian updating. These bounds permit to map quite precisely the entire picture of possible majority preference relations as well as their probabilities. We illustrate our results using survey data. Received: 13 November 2000/Accepted: 19 March 2002 This collaborative work was carried out while Regenwetter was a faculty member at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. We thank Fuqua for sponsoring our collaboration and the National Science Foundation for grant SBR-97-30076 to Michel Regenwetter. We are indebted to the editor and the referees, as well as to Jim Adams, Bob Clemen, Bernie Grofman, Bob Nau, Saša Pekeč, Jim Smith and Bob Winkler for helpful comments and suggestions.     

The probability of the paradox of voting for weak preference orderings

In this paper the probability of the voting paradox for weak orderings is calculated analytically for the three-voter-three-alternative case. It appears that the probability obtained this way is considerably smaller than in the corresponding case for linear orderings. The probability of intransitive majority relations for weak orderings in the 3 × 3 case is calculated as well, both with unconcerned and with concerned voters. Basic in the calculations are three theorems which are formulated in the field of domain conditions and restricted preferences. Received: 18 February 1997 / Accepted: 21 October 1997     

The number of weak orderings of a finite set

The number of Arrovian constitutions, when N agents are to rank n alternatives, is p(n) ^{p(n) N} , where p(n) is the number of weak orderings of n alternatives. For n≤15, p(n) is the nearest integer to n!/2(log2) ^{n +1}, the dominant term of a series derived by contour integration of the generating function. For large n, about n/17 additional terms in the series suffice to compute p(n) exactly. Received: 29 May 1995 / Accepted: 22 May 1997     

Further remarks on Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem and the weak Pareto principle

Weak Pareto versions of Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem are established for mixture-preserving utility functions defined on a mixture set of alternatives.     

Free triples,large indifference classes and the majority rule

We study classes of voting situations where agents may exhibit a systematic inability to distinguish between the elements of certain sets of alternatives. These sets of alternatives may differ from voter to voter, thus resulting in personalized families of preferences. We study the properties of the majority relation when defined on restricted domains that are the cartesian product of preference families, each one reflecting the corresponding agent’s objective indifferences, and otherwise allowing for all possible (strict) preference relations among alternatives. We present necessary and sufficient conditions on the preference domains of this type, guaranteeing that majority rule is quasi-transitive and thus the existence of Condorcet winners at any profile in the domain, and for any finite subset of alternatives. Finally, we compare our proposed restrictions with others in the literature, to conclude that they are independent of any previously discussed domain restriction.     

The Treaty of Nice and qualified majority voting

We analyse and evaluate three decision rules for the Council of Ministers of the EU, which are prescribed by the `definitive form' of the Treaty of Nice. The first will apply from 2005 to the present 15-member EU, if it will not have been enlarged by then. The second or third will apply to an enlarged 27-member EU. We conclude that the first of these is an improvement on the current decision rule; but the other two have extremely undesirable features. Received: 23 February 2001/Accepted: 26 March 2001     

The impartial culture maximizes the probability of majority cycles

Many papers have studied the probability of majority cycles, also called the Condorcet paradox, using the impartial culture or related distributional assumptions. While it is widely acknowledged that the impartial culture is unrealistic, conclusions drawn from the impartial culture are nevertheless still widely advertised and reproduced in textbooks. We demonstrate that the impartial culture is the worst case scenario among a very broad range of possible voter preference distributions. More specifically, any deviation from the impartial culture over linear orders reduces the probability of majority cycles in infinite samples unless the culture from which we sample is itself inherently intransitive. We prove this statement for the case of three candidates and we provide arguments for the conjecture that it extends to any number of candidates.All three authors thank the Fuqua School of Business for supporting their research collaboration. Regenwetter and Grofman gratefully acknowledge the precious support of the National Science Foundation through grant #SBR-9730076 on Probabilistic Models of Social Choice (Methodology, Measurement and Statistics program). We are grateful to the referees and we thank Saa Peke for critical comments on an earlier draft. Grofman thanks Scott L. Feld for numerous reminders about the implausibility of the impartial culture assumption which helped lead to this paper.     

On the leximin and utilitarian overtaking criteria with extended anonymity

We present an extension of the overtaking criterion, called fixed-step overtaking social welfare relation (SWR), and its leximin counterpart, called fixed-step W-leximin SWR, for the evaluation of infinite utility streams. Our SWRs satisfy Fixed-step Anonymity. First, we characterize them by using the consistency, called Weak Fixed-step Indifference Consistency, which links indifference for infinite utility streams to indifference for their truncated vectors that are taken periodically. Second, we characterize another utilitarian extension, called S{mathcal{S}}-overtaking SWR, by replacing the consistency with Fixed-step Anonymity. The S{mathcal{S}}-overtaking SWR is a subrelation of the fixed-step overtaking SWR. Meanwhile, the leximin counterpart of the S{mathcal{S}}-overtaking SWR coincides with the fixed-step W-leximin SWR, and we obtain its alternative characterization using Fixed-step Anonymity. Finally, we generalize the impossibility of combining Fixed-step Anonymity with the catching-up SWR by showing the Pareto and strong consistency axioms satisfied by the catching-up SWR come in conflict with Fixed-step Anonymity.     

Disability,politics and poverty in a majority world context

This paper argues that the spread of free market economics throughout the world has generated unprecedented inequalities within and between nation states. This has led to the systematic exclusion of people with perceived impairments from the mainstream of economic and community life in almost all societies, the generation of an international disabled people’s movement, and their demand for legal frameworks with which to address the multiple deprivations encountered by people viewed as ‘disabled’. It is argued that the poverty and exclusion encountered by disabled people and other oppressed groups in all societies will not be eliminated without fundamental structural change at the international level.     

Justification of the simple majority and chairman rules

Employing the uncertain dichotomous model, this work proves the optimality of the simple majority and the chairman rules under complete ignorance of the decision competencies of the decision makers. The optimality of these commonly used rules is also retained under certain patterns of partial information on the characteristics of the distribution of the members' competencies.     

Disability,poverty and development: critical reflections on the majority world debate

Beyond rough estimates, little is known about disability in the majority world and complexities related to context and poverty are too often unacknowledged in the quest to simplify, generalise and export disability discourse, models and strategies. Disability remains peripheral to the larger development agenda and the disability studies debate maintains an almost exclusive focus on western settings, loaded with associated historical, social and cultural assumptions. In the light of this, this paper seeks to elucidate and engage with complex issues surrounding the disability and majority world debate, critique and challenge the exportation of western focused disability models and discourse and engage with possible avenues for bridging the gap between disability and development.     

The tyranny of the moral majority: American religion and politics since the pilgrim fathers

Abstract

Americans claim to be the most religious people in the Christian world. Religion has informed their politics ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, who began the tyranny of the majority which Tocqueville outlined in Democracy in America (1985), his version of Aristotle's ‘ochlocracy’. In recent times this has taken the form of the ‘moral majority’ institutionalized by Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists who set out to capture the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan. In fact, it was never a majority: ‘born again’ Christians, not all of the right‐wing in politics, were less than one fifth of a national sample in 1980 ‐ a third of African Americans, who voted ten to one against Reagan. Nonetheless they influenced every President from Eisenhower to Bush, and they are the major force behind the move to impeach Clinton. Since they failed, they may now give way for a more moderate politics of Christian forgiveness.     

Special majority rules and the existence of voting equilibria

This paper is concerned with voting rules in which one alternative defeats a second alternative if and only if it is preferred to the second alternative by a pre-specified proportion of the individuals who have strict preferences on the pair. In particular, the paper focuses on the potential of two alternative lower bounds (for the proportion used) as tools for studying the existence of voting equilibria (i.e., for studying the existence of alternatives which cannot be defeated). It establishes that there are certain important contexts where one of the two bounds does not directly reveal whether any voting equilibria exist, but the other one does.     

Personality, drug preference, drug use, and drug availability

This study examined the relationship between drug preference, drug use, drug availability, and personality among individuals (n = 100) in treatment for substance abuse in an effort to replicate the results of an earlier study (Feldman, Kumar, Angelini, Pekala, & Porter, 2007) designed to test prediction derived from Eysenck's (1957, 1967) theories. Drug preference was measured by the method of paired-comparison and personality was measured with the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire-50 CC. Contrary to expectations, high compared with low scorers on Sociability and Impulsive-Sensation Seeking preferred depressants. Surprisingly, low compared with high scorers on neuroticism did not differ in preference for alcohol. As in the previous study, drug preference, use, and availability were highly correlated, although ease of availability was slightly more predictive of drug use than drug preference. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Initiating e-learning by stealth,participation and consultation in a late majority institution

Abstract

The extent to which opportunities afforded by e-learning are embraced by an institution can depend in large measure on whether it is perceived as enabling and transformative or as a major and disruptive distraction. Most case studies focus on the former. This paper describes how e-learning was introduced into the latter environment. The sensitivity of competing pressures in a research intensive university substantially influenced the manner in which e-learning was promoted. This paper tells that story, from initial stealth to eventual university acknowledgement of the relevance of e-learning specifically to its own context.