The premiss-based approach to judgment aggregation

In the theory of judgment aggregation, it is known for which agendas of propositions it is possible to aggregate individual judgments into collective ones in accordance with the Arrow-inspired requirements of universal domain, collective rationality, unanimity preservation, nondictatorship and propositionwise independence. But it is only partially known for which agendas it is possible to respect additional requirements, notably non-oligarchy, anonymity, no individual veto power, or implication preservation. We fully characterize the agendas for which there are such possibilities, thereby answering the most salient open questions about propositionwise judgment aggregation. Our results build on earlier results by Nehring and Puppe (2002), Nehring (2006) and Dietrich and List (2007a).

Judgment aggregation is a mathematical theory of collective decision-making. It concerns the methods whereby individual opinions about logically interconnected issues of interest can, or cannot, be aggregated into one collective stance. Aggregation problems have traditionally been of interest for disciplines like economics and the political sciences, as well as philosophy, where judgment aggregation itself originates from, but have recently captured the attention of disciplines like computer science, artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Judgment aggregation has emerged in the last decade as a unifying paradigm for the formalization and understanding of aggregation problems. Still, no comprehensive presentation of the theory is available to date. This Synthesis Lecture aims at filling this gap presenting the key motivations, results, abstractions and techniques underpinning it.

This special issue of Social Choice and Welfare collects papers that study the interplay between deliberative and aggregative approaches to the formation of collective attitudes. Most of the contributions in this issue focus on so-called aggregative collective attitudes and, in particular, on aggregated beliefs, judgments, and preferences. As their name suggests, this type of collective attitude is defined through the mechanism that leads to its formation: aggregative collective attitudes are those that are obtained by putting together, i.e. aggregating, the attitudes of individuals. Beliefs, judgments, or preferences obtained through some form of voting are paradigm examples of aggregative attitudes. The properties of aggregative collective attitudes and their corresponding aggregation procedures are well studied. Social Choice Theory (Gaertner 2009) has mapped the possibilities and also the limits of the aggregation of preferences. The theory of Judgment Aggregation (Grossi and Pigozzi 2014) has done the same for the aggregation of categorical, logically connected judgments. Aggregative attitudes can be distinguished from common and from corporate ones (List 2014). Common collective attitudes are those that all group members share, and perhaps that are even public in the relevant sense (Williams 2023). Notions like common knowledge and common beliefs, central to theories of collective agency (Chant 2008) and epistemic game theory (Pacuit and Roy 2017), for instance, are probably the most well-known examples of common group attitudes. Corporate collective attitudes, on the other hand, are those that can be attributed to institutional or corporate agents based on their behavior or status (Tollefsen 2002; List and Pettit 2011) . The main difference between these three types of group attitudes is how they relate to the attitudes of the individual members. Common attitudes have the most direct relation: by definition, they are consensual and public. If a proposition is commonly believed, for instance, then every group member believes that proposition, believes that every group member believes it, and so on. This is not necessarily the case for aggregative or corporate attitudes. Voting, for instance, is typically viewed as a mechanism to aggregate diverging opinions. It is not meant to reflect an underlying consensus B Olivier Roy

We explore how judgment aggregation and belief merging in the framework of fuzzy logic can help resolve the “Doctrinal Paradox.” We also illustrate the use of fuzzy aggregation functions in social choice theory.

The Good Society grew out of the same intellectual impulses that created its parent organization PEGS (the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society). As the founders of both entities understood the condition of the social sciences at that time, the split between empirical analysis and normative argument was impoverishing both. The empiricists had no reliable guides to determine what was worth studying, and as a result we got endless voting studies, for example, and little investigation of the rule of law. As for political and moral philosophers, they inhabited a world in which it seemed perfectly acceptable to create an ideal theory, and then say practice should be guided by these abstract ideals. Machiavelli demonstrated the costs of such a way of proceeding, and the road to the ideal is littered with states of affairs far worse than what more modest undertakings might have produced.Thus the founders of The Good Society were determined to join the empirical and the normative, and at least some of us—including the present author, who donned the mantle of editor—thought that this could best be done under the heading of “constitutional theory.” We reasoned that the central problem of the political and social sciences was how to constitute and maintain good political orders, and how the inhabitants of bad ones might create better ones. We thought of the term “constitution” as denoting the working principles of political regimes, and the machinery that set these principles in motion. In short, we hoped to promote what one of us called “realist” political and social theory, a compelling body of practice-minded theorizing. In this sense we considered ourselves the intellectual legatees of thinkers such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Madison, Tocqueville, and Hayek.Another major impulse behind the founding of the journal was that it be an outlet for work in political economy. Since the days of Adam Smith, we believed, it had been plain that there are not two subjects, economics and political science, but one, political economy. (If confirmation were needed the recent work of Thomas Picketty provides it.) Thus, the apparatus of economic life is largely a political creation—consider the regulation of markets, or the role of taxation in the distribution of wealth. As for political life, at least in democratic societies, a principal subject of politics is economics—for example, who is to benefit from economic transactions, and to what degree.Altogether then, the purpose of the journal was to promote the study of constitutional political economy, although not all of its founders would have used this specific language. Regardless, we scoured the landscape for scholars working in this vein and gave them a venue to publish their work in a form that best suited their purposes. Thus, much of what we published took the form of essays, some polemical, some more scholarly. We did not require that contributors employ the standard format of scholarly article, believing that the essay form was a good way to break new theoretical ground. We started in 1991, and with the help of a cadre of graduate students at the University of Maryland, we managed at least to keep our purposes in mind and served them often enough.The journal changed a lot over the subsequent twenty-five years, under my watch and that of my successors. Its focus gradually shifted from constitutional political economy to Civic Studies, which embraces but is not limited to the former. In the process, the journal's mission has grown fuzzier in some ways and clearer in others. Still, I believe it remains guided by the masthead motto we adopted at its launch: Walter Lippmann's statement that “the art of governing well has to be learned.”

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment. The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of detente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression) ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline. Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or “multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Williamstown, MA (dpaul@williams.edu). He is the author of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political economy.

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the balance of economics and political science in Islamic political economy. The economic science here refers to economics value based on Islamic teaching, while political science refers to political value based on Islam. Whereas Islamic political science is a field that evaluates the interaction between the Islamic economy and politics as well as the implication of the influences of one field on the other.Beyond this assessment, between the economic and political value, which one is more influential in Islamic political economy? To date, most scholars are inclined towards the influence of their respective field. For those in economic field, the focus of Islamic political economy is mostly directed towards economic value rather than political value.Similarly, those who are in politics will be more inclined towards the political value rather than economic.Thus, which of the political or economic value should be made priority in Islamic political economy? Based on literature review and textual analysis, this paper will firstly, re-evaluate the issue where it is perceived that Islamic political economy does not necessarily need to focus on both political and economic value; secondly, analyse the extent to which the economic and political values are needed in Islamic political economy; and thirdly, summarise the option between the economic and political value in Islamic political economy in order to achieve a holistic field of study in overcoming problems and presenting solution for the political economy of the Ummah (Islamic nation). Keywords. Economic Value, Political Value, Islamic Political Economy. JEL. P47, P26, P16.

Iran's Political Economy since the Revolution

Introduction to Judgment Aggregation

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.

The expert authors in this timely volume offer diverse perspectives on how corruption distorts state and market relations, while drawing from insights in political science, economics, and law. This book represents a new wave of research in political economy, relying on methodological rigor to address topics ranging from corruption in taxation and trade to crony capitalism and false anticorruption reforms. Key chapters provide a thorough review of the literature on links between political connections and democratic institutions. Special attention is paid to the OECD Anti Bribery Convention, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, China’s anti-corruption drive, and language used to discuss tax evasion. Case studies from various regions—such as China, Paraguay, South Africa, and New York City— anchor the analysis with real world situations. Greed, Corruption, and the Modern State is a critical resource for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in development, economics, governance, and corruption.

The article shows the weakness of mainstream Polish political science. Its main weakness, according to the author, is omitting the industrial and corporate power conflict among the factors determining the contemporary politics. As a result, the relations between political science and political economy have become weak. Its place as a source of inspiration for political scientists has been taken by social philosophy. It seeks the various non-economic sources of politics. The postulated critical political science puts in the spotlight the main processes of the global capitalist economy located in a phase of stagnation and closing in on the natural limits of its duration. In particular, closer attention should be focused on tracking a new, already the fifth configuration of the market society. It will be the several partial processes weave; the recovery process of autonomy by the state to corporations and the financial sector (deglobalisation); the process of recovering control of the state by the old and new social movements (democracy participatory), and the process of transformation of the energy economy, coupled with the process of changing lifestyles: from consumerism to paideia as a human community responsive to its activity on the development, openness and creativity in shaping new rules for civilization.

Logical puzzles like the doctrinal paradox raise the problem of how to aggregate individual judgements into a collective judgement, or alternatively, how to merge collectively inconsistent knowledge bases. In this paper, we view judgement aggregation as a function on propositional logic valuations, and we investigate how logic constrains judgement aggregation. In particular, we show that there is no non-dictatorial decision method for aggregating sets of judgements in a logically consistent way if the decision method is local, i.e., only depends on the individual judgements on the proposition under consideration.

Economists maintain that the study of public policymaking falls outside the scope of their discipline. How and why public policies are made should be studied by political science. Policy debates in economics take place within a generally agreed framework referred to in the paper as the 'optimisation paradigm'. There are two central assumptions: 1) there is a 'technocratic' relationship between economists and policymakers based on a separation of functions: policymakers provide the objectives of policy and economists the best instruments of policy; 2) public policymaking is and ought to be 'rational'. A detailed examination of both assumptions reveals that the optimisation paradigm has serious shortcomings. This conclusion is reinforced by the accounts of many economists who have had active involvement in public policymaking. The economist's policy paradigm is in need of revision, which will inevitably require a collective effort. We recommend a return to the 'political economy' approach in which economists will participate in policymaking as 'positive political economists' rather than technical experts 'divorced' from politics.