Social Choice and the "Group Will"

The decision-making procedure used by a group can be thought of as a process intended to reveal the "group will". The question addressed by social choice theorists, starting with Kenneth Arrow's work [1951], has been: what procedure can a group use to aggregate the individual preferences of its members such that the resultant "group preference" can legitimately be said to represent the group's will? Much of social choice theory calls into question the very existence of such a procedure. Arrow's famous Impossibility theorem states that the only procedures capable of producing unambiguous results are a dictatorship or one where the range of allowed individual preferences are restricted. Clearly neither of these alternatives satisfies our intuitive notion of a group will. For this reason, many researchers have argued that Arrow's original conditions are sufficient but not necessary conditions for a "will-revealing procedure". Many have suggested certain relaxations of these conditions and shown that practical and powerful procedures are possible. It has even been argued that for a group to truly be considered self-governing, it must violate Arrow's conditions.

"In this view of self-government, public decisions must be plausibly understood by members of the collectivity as reflecting, expressing, or revealing a will that is authentically their own, and there must be least be social consensus on procedures for determining or verifying the content of this will, such that one can in principle assess the extent to which public action fulfills or deviates from it."
- from "The Possibility of Self-Governance"

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