Social Choice and Political Science

This chapter deals with models of collective choice in which individual agents’ preferences are aggregated into collective behavior. The first class of models use some fixed method to aggregate preferences. We assume that collective choices can be observed, but that individual agents’ preferences are unobserved. The second class of models are more structured models of voting in political economy and political science. A common idea in political science is that voters' preferences are “Euclidean”; we present the testable implications of this notion. Finally, we consider models of individual voter behavior and work out the corresponding observable implications.