Approval voting has attracted considerable interest among voting theorists, but they have rarely investigated it in the Arrovian frame-work of social welfare functions (SWF) and never connected it with Arrow's impossibility theorem. This note explores these two directions. Assuming that voters...

Any procedure of social choice makes use of some types of information and ignores others. For example, the method of majority decision concentrates on people's votes, but pays no direct attention to, say, their social standings, or their prosperity or penury, or even the intensities of their...

Arrow's theorem proves that no voting procedure can meet certain conditions of both fairness and logic. In this note, Grant Hayden explores the ramifications of the theorem for qualitative vote dilution. After describing Arrow's argument, Mr. Hayden considers four democratic voting procedures...