The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on...

The paper challenges the "orthodox doctrine" of collective choice theory according to which Arrow's "general possibility theorem" precludes rational decision procedures generally and implies that in particular all voting procedures must be flawed. I point out that all voting procedures are...

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow's theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow's theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of...

Why should political parties say what they do not want instead of saying what they want? In this paper, we introduce the concept of negative positioning into spatial models of voting and discuss its relevance as a campaigning tool in European multiparty systems. By negative positioning, we refer...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

The strengths and weaknesses of federalism have been debated for centuries. But one major possible advantage of building decentralization and limited government into a constitution has been largely ignored in the debate so far: its potential for reducing the costs of widespread political...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. In a game of endogenous coalition formation, I show that voting...

Members of an assembly that chooses policies on a series of multidimensional ideological issues have incentives to coalesce and coordinate their votes, forming political parties. If an agent has an advantage to organize a party at a lower cost, a unique party forms and the policy outcome moves...

Understanding voter behavior is a matter of first-order importance. Yet, leading theories of how voters choose between candidates are rooted in two very different paradigms, with starkly different behavioral implications. Exploiting the incentive structure of Germany's electoral system, we...