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Social choice theory and American elections

P. R. Brahmananda

THE RECENTLY-concluded US Presidential election has an important bearing on modern social choice theory, associated with the name of Kenneth Arrow. There were two dominant candidates in the Election, G and B. G obtained the majority of the popular votes but B was implicitly declared the victor in effect, in the Electoral College by the majority opinion (five-to-four) of the US Supreme Court. The latter virtually gave Florida to B, who thereby, was able to reach the majority, albeit very narrow, in the e lectoral college votes.

The outcome may be termed an imposed solution accepted by both the candidates. In Arrow's social choice theory, in the case of a stalemate, a democracy cannot arrive at a solution satisfactory to both the parties in terms of the assumptions stated. The c ritical assumption is that of the irrelevance of the excluded alternative. In the US, the two methods of choice for the Presidentship were the popular vote procedure and the Electoral College procedure. The former is neither necessary nor sufficient in a n aggregate sense, where we treat each vote as equal to one.

The Electoral College procedure requires that the candidate who has to become the President, has to obtain a majority of the votes of the Electoral College members, who are chosen by the different constituent states. But the number of electoral votes in each state is not the same. Hence, in theory, a candidate can get a majority of the popular votes but may not get the majority of the electoral votes. Hence, a majority of the electoral votes is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the US Presid ential election. The candidate, however, must get the majority of the popular votes of the group of states, whose electoral votes together constitute a majority.

In the current case, the electoral process was closed before all the potentially valid Florida votes could be counted. The deadline of the Florida State legislature in choosing its electoral voters was used as a decisive point by the US Supreme Court. Th e potentially valid residual of votes, which had not been counted by the machine, had to be counted by hand. Since this process required standard rules in order to satisfy the US constitutional condition of equal treatment, the majority held the Florida court had to establish the rules.

But it also noted that such a step would require time and the deadline had already been almost reached. Thus, the majority gave the decision in favour of one of the candidates. According to Arrow's theory, this would be a sort of a dictatorship solution, assuming that in the Supreme Court's majority view, each of the two candidates was deemed to be equally probable as winner.

But why did the Supreme Court's majority opinion go in favour of one of the candidates? Did the majority bring into the issue an implicit criterion, which was not relevant to the issue? Did the majority want a finality of the long protracted election pro cess? Did it desire that some outcome had to be decided in the larger interest of the country? Would the majority have given the same view had the Democrat Gore been in place of the Republican Bush? Was it a neutral and impartial decision? We cannot know the answers. But we may believe that the near stalemate was broken by the Court bringing in alternatives that were excluded as irrelevant when the election took place.

Neither the issue of the choice between the machine and hand counting nor the requirement that the post-election counting process had to be over within a deadline, were issues. The candidates in their choices voted in terms of their preferences for the t wo personalities and the two parties with their programmes. They were not asked to choose between machine counting and hand counting. And they were also not asked to choose whether the Florida Court's deadline, should be treated as sacrosanct or not.

There is, therefore, a convolution or involved mix-up between the dictatorship solution and the condition of irrelevance of excluded alternatives. In the US case, there was a dictatorship solution, but the dictator himself seems to have implicitly and pr obably inducted irrelevance criteria in its preference. This opens up a rather important flaw in the social choice theory. The two conditions of non-dictatorship and exclusion of irrelevant alternatives do not turn out to be mutually exclusive.

The issue raised is fundamental. Why does not India agree to an external power such as the US mediating in Kashmir? If both parties agreed to it, it would be like accepting an dictatorial solution. But they would worry that the dictator may not be neutra l and may bring in considerations excluded, but hidden in his decision. He may simply opt for finality and decide, say, against India. The issue of a deadline for the dispute to be settled is not relevant to the fundamentals of India's case.

Take the opposition to the women's reservation issue by parties such as the Samajwadi Party and probably the Janata Dal factions. Since OBCs are presumed to be strong supporters of these parties, it is feared that upper caste candidates alone may dominat e when the reservation comes to force. This is not a relevant issue in according reservation of seats to women. But this factor becomes very relevant in the support for the Reservation Bill. But the discussion in Parliament never takes the form of opposi tion on this score that upper caste women candidates will get the majority of reserved seats. We are not supposed to discuss publicly issues on a caste basis. That is the hypocrisy in our democracy.

The excluded alternative often becomes very important in politics. Why did the British rule over us for such a long time and with such a small army of Britishers to protect the rulership? They knew that they could divide Indians on the basis of caste and religions. We could never agree amongst ourselves. For any such agreement would have meant that we would have to be ruled by members of some castes or religions, who would probably be in a majority.

But the different parties for a long time during the struggle against British rule never faced up to the question of an implicit non-agreement amongst ourselves as to who should rule us in the absence of the British! We could have never agreed for a dict atorship-type solution and, hence, we had to accept an outside dictator! The important lesson from the US election is that social choice becomes possible when two or more parties agree to a final dictatorship solution on a controversial issue where opini on is almost equally divided.

If the choice is between two purely economic programmes or projects, one may accept both the assumptions of non-dictatorship and the irrelevance of excluded alternatives. But in political matters, it is not possible to proceed thus. The two assumptions o ften get involuted. Again, where there is a political economy issue in which politics and economics are mixed up, the two assumptions again get intertwined. When an imposed solution is introduced, as in the US, the internal reasons why a choice is made i s not known and often prejudices may rule here. The point is that finality, or closing the contest, may itself become the decisive criterion.

We have to resort to different approaches to social choice theory in politics and political economy. The curtain is not drawn on the social choice theory.