Two Lectures on Voting Theory
1. Elections and Strategic Voting: Majority Rule (16:00-17:30 GMT +3)
2. Elections and Preference Intensity: Borda’s Rule (17:45-19:15 GMT +3)
Which voting method a society uses to elect its public officials (e.g., first-past-the-post or runoff voting) will greatly affect that society’s politics. The Jerusalem Summer School in Economics plans to devote a summer to Voting in the next few years. In the meantime, the School’s director, Eric Maskin, will give two 90-minute lectures on voting theory on June 25. The first will argue that majority rule (Condorcet’s method) is the best method to use when strategic voting is a major concern. The second will argue that Arrow’s independence of irrelevant alternatives condition is unjustifiably strong but, when relaxed appropriately, leads not to an impossibility result but to a unique social welfare function: the Borda count, a method capable of reflecting voters’ preference intensities. As is traditional in summer schools, audience members will be encouraged to ask questions.
