Social Choice and Legitimacy
The Possibilities of Impossibility

Asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for trade-offs between conflicting goals and demonstrates that such explanations can always be found.

John W. Patty (Author), Elizabeth Maggie Penn (Author)

9780521138338, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 31 July 2014

222 pages, 2 b/w illus. 7 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.33 kg

'Patty and Penn offer a brilliant and creative reinterpretation of seminal results in social choice theory. They use this platform to develop an axiomatic theory of legitimacy, rooted in the notion of principled decision making. The book brings much-needed analytical rigor and clarity to central debates in democratic theory. The authors go to great lengths to make the argument accessible to a nontechnical audience and to illustrate the theory with a series of empirical applications. This is a profound and provocative book that should be on the must-read list of democratic and social choice theorists alike.' Georg Vanberg, Duke University

Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both earlier critics and defenders of social choice theory, Patty and Penn argue that the classic impossibility theorems of Arrow, Gibbard, and Satterthwaite are inescapably relevant to, and indeed justify, democratic institutions. Specifically, these institutions exist to do more than simply make policy - through their procedures and proceedings, these institutions make sense of the trade-offs required when controversial policy decisions must be made.

Part I. The Ubiquity of Aggregation: 1. Goals and trade-offs
2. The debates surrounding social choice
3. Social choice defended
Part II. A Theory of Legitimate Choice: 4. Legitimacy and choice
5. Principles and legitimate choice
6. A social choice theory of legitimacy
7. Theory and method
Part III. Legitimate Policy Making in Practice: 8. Legislative legitimacy and judicial review
9. Structuring discussion
10. Administrative legitimacy
11. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Research methods: general [GPS]