Abstract
By tradition, Public Choice theorists have pointed out many paradoxes of collective choice. The phenomenon of cyclical majorities and the more general issue of political equilibrium have proven to be fertile searching grounds. One class of paradoxes derives from the intransitivity of social orderings implied by the cycle. As Riker (1982) notes, this property of majority rule is most perplexing and paradoxical to those who hold 'Populist' beliefs that voting reflects a fair and meaningful amalgamation of individual preferences and must, therefore, reflect 'the will of the people.' If voting in general elections and committees is interpreted this way, then the existence of voting cycles and the implied intransitivity; or more generally, the impossibility of any rule for making social choices assuring transitive (sometimes equated with rational) outcomes, shakes the foundations of Populist principles of political philosophy. Another paradox of cyclical majorities and simulations of voting games in general, concerns the stability of political equilibria. The body of theory regarding this issue is skillfully summarized by Shepsle and Weingast (1982) and can be reduced to a simple proposition: With sufficient assumptions regarding the states of participants' knowledge and the manipulability of
Published Version
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