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Social Choice and Welfare

26-04-2022 | Original Paper

Deliberative democracy and utilitarianism

Authors: Antoine Billot, Xiangyu Qu

Published in: Social Choice and Welfare

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Abstract

This paper explores the possibility, in case of belief and taste heterogeneity, to aggregate individual preferences through a deliberation process enabling society to reach a consensus. However, we show that the same deliberation process, even characterized by a convergent matrix, may lead to different consensus depending on the updating rule which is chosen by individuals, i.e., deliberation is sufficient to determine social preferences but not univocally. Then, we prove that the Pareto condition allows to choose from possible consensus the one whereby social deliberated beliefs and tastes are of a utilitarian shape.

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See, Dryzek and List (2003) among many others.

This conception of democracy is based on the postulate that, for a social decision to be democratic, it must be legitimized by an authentic deliberation and not only through an abstract process of preference aggregation (as, for instance, the majority rule in case of voting).

For instance, society can be relaxed to adopt the same behavior as individuals (see, e.g. Billot and Vergopoulos (2016)).

This also applies to numerous recent variations of the Pareto condition (see, e.g. Alon and Gayer (2016), Billot and Qu (2021) or Danan et al. (2016)).

Radical in the sense where there is no probability measure that can be viewed by each agent as sufficiently rational, realistic and decent to be used by him—switching away his own beliefs. This explains why all alternative Pareto conditions are designed as restrictions of the standard original one—that is, a reduction of the unanimity domain to some particular subsets of events which sustain social decisions: in Gilboa et al. (2004), possible aggregation is derived from a Pareto condition restricted to lottery acts through which individuals agree on the outcome distribution that is induced. Note that, however, in case of spurious unanimity, such a subset does not exist and, in a way, still there is no resolution.

As said before, distinguishing the deliberation process for beliefs and tastes is here out of scope since the implemented mechanism is basically based in both cases on individual meetings through \({\mathbf {D}}\). Then, by convenience, the same notation, i.e., \(\varphi \), is used for the belief updating rule and the taste updating one.

For instance, in the gss’s duel situation and in spurious unanimity situations in general, one could imagine each individual to be fully confident in his opinion.

Crès and Tvede (2021) calls it reflexivity.

Note that the rule proposed by Leher and Wagner (1981) belongs, among many others, to this subclass (see, Def. 5.)

The same kind of updating mapping appears in Crès and Tvede (2021).

See, examples 1 and 2 below, Sect. 2.3.

Called by Kreps (1988) the “crowning glory of choice theory”.

Both De Finetti (1974) and Savage (1954) argue against \(\sigma \)-additivity by complaining that it is an unnatural and a contrived requirement while describing behaviors.

The meaning of pc is similar to that of the standard Pareto condition. In contrast, it can be said that, in our model, its role is not to allow for aggregation but for utilitarianism.

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Title: Deliberative democracy and utilitarianism
Authors: Antoine Billot
Xiangyu Qu
Publication date: 26-04-2022
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Social Choice and Welfare
Print ISSN: 0176-1714
Electronic ISSN: 1432-217X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-022-01404-8