Equilibrium, Disequilibrium, and the General Possibility of a Science of Politics

Abstract

Perhaps it overstates matters to say that there is a crisis in formal political theory, but it is apparent that much mischief has been caused by a series of theorems that depict the chaotic features of majority-rule voting systems. These theorems, proved elegantly in recent papers by Cohen (1979), McKelvey (1976, 1979) and Schofield (1978), establish that the cyclicity of the majority preference relation is both generic and pervasive. To paraphrase the title of a recent paper by Bell (1978), when majority rule breaks down, it breaks down completely; and it “almost always” breaks down.