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The other approach is what I’ll call “political,” and the key insight is from the Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s famous Impossibility Theorem. In his framework, there is no objectively true social ranking that would obtain universal support if everyone were fully-informed: disagreements among voters reflect fundamental differences of opinion, not simply measurement error. In contrast to Condorcet — who found a solution for his problem — Arrow showed that there is no way of transforming different individual preferences into a coherent social ranking. I call this the “political” approach, because it’s not possible to appeal to some objective criteria for choosing how individual votes should be used to determine a winner; the electoral system has to be negotiated.

This is a far more realistic context for elections: different people vote for different candidates because they have different values and priorities. Some disagreements among voters may be based on misunderstandings, but too few to justify proceeding with the technocratic approach to social choice. Electoral change must be negotiated — but by whom?

As things stand now, the political parties represented in the House of Commons are expected to negotiate, and their relative negotiating power is determined by the number of seats they hold on the House’s Special Committee on Electoral Reform.

This arrangement does not bode well. One of the less-charming conceits of politicians is their habit of assuming that what is best for their party’s prospects for power is necessarily what is best for the electorate: party positions on electoral change exactly match the proposals that offer the easiest path between them and government.

Whatever emerges from the House electoral change committee will be the result of the sort of high drama and low cunning you’d expect from a typical episode of “Survivor.” But even if the committee produces a unanimous report, there’s little reason to think that it’d reflect a consensus of Canadian opinion. The only reliable way of finding out what Canadians think about electoral change is to ask them.

National Post

Stephen Gordon is a professor of economics at Université Laval.