Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short piece is a contribution to The Encylopedia of Global Justice (ed. D.K. Chatterjee) (forthcoming from Springer Verlag May 2011). It summarizes the state of reserach on the problem for collective choice discovered by Kenneth Arrow in his Impossibility Theorem. In 1951 Arrow proved that a set of four or five (depending on how one counts them) minimal constraints that seem constitutive of democratic decisionmaking, including nondictatorship and rational consistency, are mutually incompatible. This created the burgeoning field of Social Choice Theory. I explain the problem in nontechnical terms, explore its implications especially for global justice, and review the …