Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem and Dictatorship

In this paper I investigate the possibility of a dictatorship in the context of Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem. Preliminarily, some propositions about Harsanyi's Theorem are presented using an alternative principle that I name Quasi-strong Pareto, which is the latter part of Strong Pareto. Then I define dictatorship as a requirement that social preference agrees with a dictator's preference or those of members of dictatorial group even if their preferences strictly contradict those of all other people in the society. Conclusively, although in each version of Harsanyi's Theorem with Pareto Indifference, Weak Preference Pareto or Weak Pareto the social utility function may have a form of dictatorship, however if individuals' vNM utility functions are all 'individualistic' and Quasi-strong Pareto is satisfied, then the dictatorship is excluded.     

The doctrinal paradox, the discursive dilemma, and logical aggregation theory

Judgment aggregation theory, or rather, as we conceive of it here, logical aggregation theory generalizes social choice theory by having the aggregation rule bear on judgments of all kinds instead of merely preference judgments. It derives from Kornhauser and Sager??s doctrinal paradox and List and Pettit??s discursive dilemma, two problems that we distinguish emphatically here. The current theory has developed from the discursive dilemma, rather than the doctrinal paradox, and the final objective of the paper is to give the latter its own theoretical development along the line of recent work by Dietrich and Mongin. However, the paper also aims at reviewing logical aggregation theory as such, and it covers impossibility theorems by Dietrich, Dietrich and List, Dokow and Holzman, List and Pettit, Mongin, Nehring and Puppe, Pauly and van Hees, providing a uniform logical framework in which they can be compared with each other. The review goes through three historical stages: the initial paradox and dilemma, the scattered early results on the independence axiom, and the so-called canonical theorem, a collective achievement that provided the theory with its specific method of analysis. The paper goes some way towards philosophical logic, first by briefly connecting the aggregative framework of judgment with the modern philosophy of judgment, and second by thoroughly discussing and axiomatizing the ??general logic?? built in this framework.     

Power of Enforcement and Dictatorship

A new Arrovian impossibility is obtained without invoking independence of irrelevant alternatives type assumptions. The new conditions leading to the impossibility are based on the concept of power of enforcement, and specify how this power can (see A3) or cannot be expanded (see A1, A2 and A4).     

Living in the Moment: Lags,Leads, and the Link Between Legislative Agendas and Interest Advocacy*

Objectives. Based on sharply divergent interpretations about the nature of the politics of organized interests, three competing perspectives imply that organized interests variously lead, lag, or are contemporaneous with legislative agendas. Methods. We contribute to this debate by presenting data using a short‐term timeframe to assess the sequence of the relationship between legislative agendas and lobbying activity; we examine the lags and leads in the relationship between legislative agendas in 1995, 1997, and 1999 and the density of state lobbying communities in 1997 using Gray and Lowery's (1996) energy, stability, area (ESA) model of interest system density. Results. The analysis provides little support for the lagging and leading hypotheses and strong support for the contemporaneous hypothesis. Conclusions. Although this analysis will not end all debates over the sequential relationship between legislative agendas and lobbying activity, it suggests that legislative agenda and interest system density are largely governed by within‐session dynamics.     

Judgment aggregation and minimal change: a model of consensus formation by belief revision

When a group of agents attempts to reach an agreement on certain issues, it is usually desirable that the resulting consensus be as close as possible to the original judgments of the individuals. However, when these judgments are logically connected to further beliefs, the notion of closeness should also take into account to what extent the individuals would have to revise their entire belief set to reach an agreement. In this work, we present a model for generation of agreement with respect to a given agenda which allows individual epistemic entrenchment to influence the value of the consensus. While the postulates for the transformation function and their construction resemble those of AGM belief revision, the notion of an agenda is adapted from the theory of judgment aggregation. This allows our model to connect both frameworks.     

Abstract Aggregations and Proximity Preservation: An Impossibility Result

An impossibility result for completely abstract social aggregation rules is presented. It is shown that non-imposition and a new no-veto property (two properties in the spirit of the Pareto principle and non-dictatorship respectively) are incompatible with an inter-profile consistency condition formulated in terms of proximity preservation.The result in this paper has been presented in the Staff Seminar at the University of Graz and at the 2001 Meeting of the Public Choice Society in San Antonio. We are grateful to all participants, especially Hannu Nurmi and Don Saari, and to an anonymous referee for helpful comments.     

Promoting a feminist policy agenda: indigenous women leaders and closet feminism

In the Southwestern United States, Hispanas and American Indian women are increasingly adopting policymaking roles in state, local, and tribal politics. This study examines the influence of gender and ethnic identity on the policy agendas of 30 women who hold public office in New Mexico. Although the findings reveal a distinct pattern of advocacy for a feminist agenda, the majority of these indigenous leaders do not identify themselves or their goals as feminist. This research indicates that women’s policy concerns transcend ethnic/race boundaries. Furthermore, to understand Hispanas’ and Indian women’s politics, and to effectively apply feminist theory to praxis, new models incorporating their practical application of feminism are needed.     

Dictatorship on top-circular domains

We consider domains with a natural property called top-circularity. We show that if such a domain satisfies either the maximal conflict property or the weak conflict property, then it is dictatorial. We obtain the result in Sato (Rev Econ Des 14(3):331–342, 2010) as a corollary. Furthermore, it follows from our results that the union of a single-peaked domain and a single-dipped domain (with respect to a given ordering over the alternatives) is dictatorial.     

Intradimensional Single-Peakedness and the Multidimensional Arrow Problem

Arrow's account (1951/1963) of the problem of social choice is based upon the assumption that the preferences of each individual in the relevant group are expressible by a single ordering. This paper lifts that assumption and develops a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's framework. I show that, like Arrow's original framework, the multidimensional generalization is affected by an impossibility theorem, highlighting not only the threat of dictatorship of a single individual, but also the threat of dominance of a single dimension. In particular, even if preferences are single-peaked across individuals within each dimension – a situation called intradimensional single-peakedness – any aggregation procedure satisfying Arrow-type conditions will make one dimension dominant. I introduce lexicographic hierarchies of dimensions as a class of possible aggregation procedures under intradimensional single-peakedness. The interpretation of the results is discussed.     

Trickle-down or Rising Tide? Lessons on Mainstreaming Gender Policy from Colombia and South Africa

As a result of the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985) many member states of the United Nations in the South put in place some form of national machinery for the advancement of women. This paper considers that process, identifying three main phases. The first was heavily overlaid by the agendas of international development agencies and coincided with efforts to advance a "women in development" or WID agenda within international development cooperation. The second, explored here in relation to Colombia, saw a shift towards attempts to institutionalize gender awareness in development policy, the so-called "gender and development" or GAD approach. Against this background, the later South African experience is evaluated. It is argued that this potentially represents a third and distinguishable phase in the establishment of national machineries. Here structures were set up in the context of less aid dependence than many other countries and as a result of a process that was largely internally driven. Nevertheless, South Africa enjoyed tremendous support from international women's networks and lessons were learnt from past experience elsewhere, both positive and negative. The South African approach to advancing gender equality is arguably the most progressive to be found anywhere. What remains to be seen is whether it will be possible to implement, given the persistence of poverty and inequality nationally and South Africa's increasing identification with international neo-liberal agendas.     

Guns,Hollywood, and School Safety: Defining the School‐Shooting Problem Across Public Arenas*

Objective. Research in agenda setting has demonstrated that dramatic news events can drive particular issues to the top of the media and governmental agendas. The objective of this study is to analyze how different aspects of an event‐driven problem compete for attention in those arenas. Methods. The method is content analysis of media coverage and congressional legislative activity following the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. Results. The results show that while both agendas converged on the gun‐control aspect of the problem, they substantially diverged on other understandings of what kind of problem the Columbine shooting represented and how to address it. Conclusions. We conclude that the differing institutional structure and incentives of the news media and Congress can create or inhibit interinstitutional positive feedback in the problem‐defining process. Agenda divergences are amplified when prominent politicians cue the media to follow particular story lines that depart from actual legislative activity.     

How to combine pareto optimality with liberty considerations

I argue that the liberty condition of Sen's important impossibility of a Paretian liberal result is not a condition that liberals (or libertarians) would accept. The problem is that an appropriate liberty condition must be formulated in terms of consent - not in terms of preference. To formulate an adequate condition the framework needs to expand from collective choice rules (which only take information about preferences as input) to rights-based social choice rules (which also take as input information about which options have been consented to and which would violate someone's rights). I formulate a more adequate liberty condition based on the notion of consent that is acceptable to liberals, and then show that Pareto optimality is incompatible even with that condition. I then show how the liberty condition can be weakened in a plausible manner, and describe an interesting class of theories - rights-based Paretian theories - that satisfy the Pareto optimality requirement while being sensitive to liberty considerations.     

The responsiveness of state legislatures and their agenda concerning gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender interests

Republicanism, as opposed to direct democracy, has been theorized to protect minority rights. Direct democracy with its majority rule is unlikely to serve the interests of minorities particularly if their interests are perceived to conflict with the majority's interests. However, Republican Institutions vary in features that affect their responsiveness to majoritarian preferences. This article examines whether specific legislative features associated with responsiveness (majoritarian participation, constituent ties and professionalism) affect the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) agenda in state legislatures. The findings suggest that the importance of these features is dependent on the ideological leanings of the state. The findings also suggest that some features expand both pro- and anti-GLBT agendas, and the effects of professionalism are ambiguous.     

The independence condition in the theory of social choice

Arrow's theorem is really a theorem about the independence condition. In order to show the very crucial role that this condition plays, the theorem is proved in a refined version, where the use of the Pareto condition is almost avoided.A distinction is made between group preference functions and group decision functions, yielding respectively preference relations and optimal subsets as values. Arrow's theorem is about the first kind, but some ambiguities and mistakes in his book are explained if we assume that he was really thinking of decision functions. The trouble then is that it is not clear how to formulate the independence condition for decision functions. Therefore the next step is to analyse Arrow's argument for accepting the independence condition.The most frequent ambiguity depends on an interpretation of A as the set of all conceivable alternatives, while the variable subset B is the set of all feasible or available alternatives. He then argues that preferences between alternatives that are not feasible shall not influence the choice from the set of available alternatives. But even if this principle is accepted, it only forces us to require independence with respect to some specific set B and not to every B simultaneously. Therefore the independence condition cannot be accepted on these grounds.Another argument is about an election where one of the candidates dies. On one interpretation this argument can be taken to support an independence requirement which leads to a contradiction. On another interpretation it is a condition about connexions between choices from different sets.The so-called problem of binary choice is found to be different from the independence problem and it plays no essential role in Arrow's impossibility result. Other impossibility results by Sen, Batra and Pattanaik and by Schwartz are of a different character.In the last section, several weaker independence conditions are presented. Their relations to Arrow's condition are stated and the arguments supporting them are discussed.     

Social Policy and the Discipline of Social Administration

The last ten years have seen a spate of books analysing social policy in terms of ideologies or models of welfare. These models, which combine an explanatory or scientific and a normative or value component, offer the discipline of social administration a terrain or base of its own from which it can legitimately explore a range of normative and scientific issues. It is suggested that the central task of social policy analysis, at the highest level of generality of the discipline, is to tease out the relevant normative and factual propositions or assumptions underlying these models and subject them to close scrutiny. In this the discipline would largely be following, but also extending somewhat, the agenda for social administration outlined by Richard Titmuss in 1968.     

Nondictatorial social welfare functions with different discrimination structures

In societies where agents distinguish imperfectly among the alternatives, a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of an Arrovian Social Welfare Function is the presence of an agent who only distinguishes two groups of alternatives or of two agents with complementary discrimination patterns. This result is based on the observation that differences in discrimination structures may lead to the absence of free triples, thus providing a way to escape Arrow's impossibility result.     

When Does the Public's Issue Agenda Affect the Media's Issue Agenda (and Vice-Versa)? Developing a Framework for Media-Public Influence*

Objective. The agenda-setting literature has demonstrated the media's ability to set the issue agenda for the public. One byproduct of this work is that researchers have produced some evidence suggesting that the audience will, on occasion, set the issue agenda for the media. Given disparate sets of findings, researchers do not have a framework to better understand on which issues the media will set the agenda for the public and on which issues the public will set the agenda for the media. It is the goal of this article to provide empirical support for a framework suggesting that the events comprising issue areas predetermine the direction of influence between the media's and the public's issue agendas. Methods. I construct a historical data set comprised of 35,000 stories from the nightly network news and responses to Gallup's Most Important Problem question. I look for evidence of causal influence between news issue content and public issue concerns using Granger analysis and vector autoregression. Results. Issue areas comprised of spectacular events, such as defense, will be reported by the media and subsequently affect the salience the audience assigns to those issues. In issues not normally comprised of spectacular and singular events, such as energy and environment, public issue concerns appear to drive issue coverage in the news. Issues such as transportation and education, which comprise few spectacular events and little public concern, will receive sparse coverage in the media. Conclusion. The findings provide support for a framework based on events; the types of events that typically comprise issue areas will affect the likelihood of those issues coming on the news agenda. This then affects the direction of influence between the public and the media. The framework supported here allows for the integration of the media effects and media content literatures. This has implications for understanding how the news agenda is constructed and how the commercial media meets democratic ideals.     

Improving the lives of Ghanaian children: complementing the global agenda with a structural social work approach

Manful SE, Manful E. Improving the lives of Ghanaian children: complementing the global agenda with a structural social work approach Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 115–123 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. In principle, Ghana's commitment to the global agenda for improving the welfare of children cannot be disputed. Globalisation has advanced changes in the country's institutional landscape with the introduction of economic reforms and administrative institutional frameworks to improve the welfare of children, amongst others. This article discusses the impacts of two global agendas, the Structural Adjustment Program and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It argues that the economic reforms and the legal framework to ensure the welfare of children have not achieved their envisaged goals, because the global initiatives focused on institutional changes, neglecting social factors that cause inequalities. Consequently, these factors have contributed to the inability of adequate service provision for children. To alleviate the problem, this article suggests that a structural social work approach be adopted in Ghana as a complementary strategy to improve the welfare of children.     

Intergroup Evaluations and Norms about Learning Ability

Children's evaluations of classmates with learning difficulties tend to be less positive than their evaluations of classmates without learning difficulties; but it is not clear if these evaluations are associated with age, group norms, and group identification. These associations were examined within the context of inclusive elementary school classrooms. Participants (N = 192) were asked about their attitudes and their peers' attitudes towards children with or without learning difficulties. They were also asked to evaluate fictional target children who gave biased or unbiased opinions about children with or without learning difficulties. Results showed that group identification was predicted by age and group judgment. Participants with high group identification and judgment scores in favour of children without learning difficulties were inclined to believe other children would be similarly biased. However, most participants preferred the target child who gave unbiased opinions. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.