Abstract
Although championed by the Marquis the Condorcet and many others, majority rule has often been rejected as indeterminate, incoherent, or implausible. Majority rule's arch competitor is the Borda count, proposed by the Count de Borda, and there has long been a dispute between the two approaches. In several publications, Donald Saari has recently presented what is arguably the most vigorous and systematic defense of Borda ever developed, a project Saari has supplemented with equally vigorous objections to majority rule. In this article I argue that both Saari's objections to majority rule and his positive case for the Borda count fail. I hold the view that defenders of Condorcet cannot muster arguments to convince supporters of Borda, and vice versa, but here I am only concerned to show that the Count de Borda cannot beat the Marquis de Condorcet. Saari's approach displays what I take to be widespread fallacies in reasoning about social choice worthy of closer analysis. This debate bears on important questions in the philosophy of social choice theory.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Marc Fleurbaey, Hélène Landemore, Richard Zeckhauser, two referees for Soc Choice Welf, and the members of the workshop on “Probabilistic Modeling” at the Center for Junior Research at the University of Konstanz for comments and discussions. Thanks to Steven Brams and Remzi Sanver for letting me read their unpublished work [1]. Many thanks also Donald Saari for drawing my attention to a grave error in the penultimate draft of this piece.
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Risse, M. Why the count de Borda cannot beat the Marquis de Condorcet. Soc Choice Welfare 25, 95–113 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0045-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0045-3