Abstract
Recognizing that all social choice takes place in the context of some status quo, the social choice process is modeled as a sequence of challenges to the status quo. In order to mount a successful challenge, the proponents of change must generate sufficient power to overcome the status quo. Power is viewed as an amalgam of economic, political and more general social power — such as the ability to communicate and shape public opinion. Individual power expresses both the ability and the desire to influence outcomes and, as such, varies from individual to individual as well as from social state to social state for each individual.
Existence of equilibrium under a power rule is established, and stability of equilibrium is discussed.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arrow KJ (1951) Social choice and individual values. John Wiley & Sons, New York
Chichilnisky G (1980) Social choice and the topology of spaces of preferences. Adv Math 37:165–176
Fishburn PC (1973) The theory of social choice. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Hildreth C (1953) Alternative conditions for social orderings. Econometrica 21:81–94
Kelly JS (1978) Arrow impossibility theorems. Academic Press, New York
Kelly JS (1971) The continuous representation of a social preference ordering. Econometrica 39:593–597
Kramer GH (1973) On a class of equilibrium conditions for majority rule. Econometrica 41:285–297
McKelvey RD (1979) General conditions for global intransitivities in formal voting models. Econometrica 47:1085–1112
McManus M (1982) Some properties of topological social choice functions. Rev Econ Studies 49:447–460
Ng YK (1980) Welfare economics introduction and development of basic concepts. John Wiley & Sons, New York
Pattanaik PK (1971) Voting and collective choice. Cambridge University Press, London and New York
Plott CR (1976) Axiomatic social choice theory: on overview and interpretation. Am J Polit Sci, 20:511–596
Saposnik R (1975) On transitivity of the social preference relation under simple majority rule. J Econ Theory 10:1–7
Schofield N (1980) Generic properties of simple Bergsen-Samuelson welfare functions. J Math Econ 7:175–192
Sen AK (1970) Collective choice and social welfare. Holden-Day, San Francisco
Sen AK (1977) Social choice theory: a re-examination. Econometrica 45:53–89
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Saposnik, R. A power rule for social choice. Soc Choice Welfare 1, 97–103 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00452881
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00452881