Is Democracy Impossible?: Riker's Mistaken Accounts of Antebellum Politics

Abstract

<P><B>Introduction.</B> <BR>In his Liberalism against Populism, an interpretation of the results of social choice theory, Riker (1982) makes an apparently powerful case against the very intelligibility of majoritarian democracy. Because different voting systems yield different outcomes from the same profile of individual voters' preferences, he argues, democracy is inaccurate. The claim is made by way of examples that establish logical possibility. However, for real-world distributions of individual preference orders – individual orderings are at least mildly correlated with one another rather than random – the reasonable voting rules tend to converge on the same outcomes (Mackie 2000).</P>