Avoiding Majority Dissatisfaction on a Series of Majority Decisions

摘要

Applying majority voting on a set of proposals may result in a series of decisions for which there exists a majority of voters who disagree with the collective decision in a majority of cases. This phenomenon is known as Anscombe's paradox. In this paper, we provide new domains of individual opinions free of this paradox. To achieve this, we assume that there are some unifying proposals such that, due to some common values, each voter deviates from a given list of issue-specific standards only on a limited number of unifying proposals. For example, the notion of unifying proposals captures issues such as sovereignty or war against terrorism for which voters, because of patriotism or common-sense, generally unite across the political divide to deal with these crucial issues.