Incoherent majorities: The McGarvey problem in judgement aggregation

Abstract

Judgement aggregation is a model of social choice where the space of social alternatives is the set of consistent truth-valuations (‘judgements’) on a family of logically interconnected propositions. It is well known that propositionwise majority voting can yield logically inconsistent judgements. We show that, for a variety of spaces, propositionwise majority voting can yield any possible judgement. By considering the geometry of sub-polytopes of the Hamming cube, we also estimate the number of voters required to achieve all possible judgements. These results generalize the classic results of McGarvey (1953) [13] and Stearns (1959) [22].