Covering, dominance, and institution-free properties of social change

Abstract

This paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar, so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules. Specifically, in a multidimensional setting, where all voters have strictly quasi-concave preferences, it is shown that the "uncovered set" contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings. The three institutional settings are two-candidate competition in a large electorate, cooperative behavior in small committees, and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously. Because of its apparent institution-free properties, the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist. A general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven, and for the Downsian case, bounds for the uncovered set are computed. These bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points.