Suchergebnisse

Das derzeitige Wahlsystem zum Deutschen Bundestag weist einen schwerwiegenden Defekt auf: Mehr Stimmen für eine Partei können dazu führen, dass diese weniger Sitze erhält - das sogenannte negative Stimmgewicht. Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat den Bundestag aufgefordert, bis Ende Juni 2011 diesen Fehler durch eine Änderung des Wahlrechts zu beseitigen. Hierzu gibt es eine Vielzahl von Möglichkeiten. Dieser Artikel unternimmt den Versuch, mögliche Änderungen aus Sicht der Social Choice-Theorie zu beurteilen. Hierzu wird ein einfaches System von Bedingungen an Wahlen vorgestellt, anhand dessen die bisherigen Lösungsvorschläge systematisiert werden. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass es kein Wahlsystem geben kann, das gleichzeitig all diesen Bedingungen genügt. Dennoch lassen sich unter den existierenden Änderungsvorschlägen solche identifizieren, die mehr wünschenswerte Bedingungen erfüllen als andere.

The discussion of strategic voting and agenda manipulation tends to be highly abstract. Most real‐world examples are either artificial or politically insignificant; the few paradigmatic examples which do exist are discussed again and again. This is one reason why many empirically minded political scientists often ignore the whole social choice approach. The purpose of this article is to focus on a single event ‐ the election of the Finnish President in 1956 ‐ and to show that almost all theoretically interesting phenomena studied in the social‐choice literature were present. The paper is based on empirical material, especially on subjective descriptions provided by the main actors. This kind of approach is recommended as a complement to the deductive‐theoretical approach.

In democracies citizens are supposed to have some control over the general direction of policy. According to a pretheoretical interpretation of this idea, the people have control if elections and other democratic institutions compel officials to do what the people want, or what the majority want. This interpretation of popular control fits uncomfortably with insights from social choice theory; some commentators—Riker, most famously—have argued that these insights should make us abandon the idea of popular rule as traditionally understood. This article presents a formal theory of popular control that responds to the challenge from social choice theory. It makes precise a sense in which majorities may be said to have control even if the majority preference relation has an empty core. And it presents a simple game-theoretic model to illustrate how majorities can exercise control in this specified sense, even when incumbents are engaged in purely re-distributive policymaking and the majority rule core is empty.

The paper contrasts the liberal conception of democracy as the aggregation of individual preferences with the deliberative conception of democracy as a process of open discussion leading to an agreed judgement on policy. Social choice theory has identified problems – the arbitrariness of decision rules, vulnerability to strategic voting – which are often held to undermine democratic ideals. Contrary to common opinion, I argue that deliberative democracy is less vulnerable to these difficulties than liberal democracy. The process of discussion tends to produce sets of policy preferences that are 'single peaked'; and within a deliberative setting it may be possible to vary the decision rule according to the nature of the issue to be decided.