Preference Aggregation, Functional Pathologies, and Democracy: A Social Choice Defense of Participatory Democracy

Abstract

Riker (1982) and others maintain that general impossibility of aggregating individual preferences into consistent collective choices implies that liberalism is the only kind of democracy actually attainable. We argue that implications of impossibility theorems are consistent with, and implied by, logic of participatory conception of democracy. In this view, democratic method is justified not because it necessarily produces decisions that are adequate representations of public preferences, but because participation implicit in method contributes to development of human capabilities. Given that impossibility results derived from theory of voting thus suggest more, rather than less, democracy, they may be viewed as functional rather than pathological.