The impossibility of a Paretian republican? Some comments on Pettit and Sen

The Impossibility of a Paretian Republican?

Philip Pettit (2001) has suggested that there are parallels between his republican account of freedom and Amartya Sen’s (1970) account of freedom as decisive preference. In this paper, I discuss these parallels from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. I sketch a formalization of republican freedom, and argue that republican freedom is formally very similar to freedom as defined in Sen’s “min...

The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal: Reply

Connecting and Resolving Sen’s and Arrow’s Theorems

It is shown that the source of Sen’s and Arrow’s impossibility theorems is that Sen’s Liberal condition and Arrow’s IIA counter the critical assumption that voters’ have transitive preferences. As this means the admissible procedures cannot distinguish whether voters have transitive or irrational cyclic preferences, the Pareto condition forces cycles. Once this common cause of these perplexing ...

The Elephant Will Kick the Donkey: An Attitudinal Analysis of Online Comments on the GOP Letter to the Iranian Supreme Leader

With the growth in sociality and interaction around touching national and international topics, news sites are increasingly becoming places for communities to discuss and address issues spurred by news articles. Proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia (Papacharissi, 2004). Comment writers, according t...

Aggregating Sets of Judgments: Two Impossibility Results Compared1

The “doctrinal paradox” or “discursive dilemma” shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure ...