An Overview and Re-interpretation of Paradoxes of Responsiveness

Abstract

One of the most obvious desiderata of democratic decision-making is<br />that the political outcomes (policies, elected persons, legislation) be responsive to<br />popular opinions. In representative forms of governance the responsiveness is not<br />expected to pertain to every single outcome, but the very idea of going to the people<br />seems to presuppose some degree of responsiveness. In social choice theory<br />several notions that aim to capture aspects of responsiveness have been introduced<br />and related to other desiderata of social choice. We shall discuss the most common<br />notions and discuss their relevance in democratic decision making. We shall also<br />look at the paradoxes related to non-responsiveness from a novel angle, viz. we try<br />to determine their significance to the multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). It<br />turns out that some methods of aggregating criterion performances of policy alternatives<br />can be ruled out because of their bizarre behavior under some decision settings.<p><br /></p>