Populist Political Choices Are Meaningless.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre
• Position: Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice

Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice

By William H. Riker

311 pp.; W.H. Freeman, 1982

Despite last fall's defeat of Donald Trump, populism in the United States is not dead. Perhaps next up for America is left-wing populism, which is more like the right-wing variety than many people realize. Hence, reviewing political scientist William Riker's classic Liberalism Against Populism is appropriate and urgent.

Published in 1982, the book is noteworthy both for its overview of social choice theory--a framework for analyzing how collective choices relate to individual preferences--and for the lessons it draws from the clash between populism and political liberalism.

Riker (1920-1993) was a professor of political science and department chairman at the University of Rochester. He pioneered what he called "positive political theory," based on rational choice, formal economic modeling, and empirically falsifiable statements. He led political scientists to discover economist Kenneth Arrow's seminal 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values, which launched the modern theory of social choice. Riker was also involved with the economic theory of public choice, an overlapping but different research area, and was president of the Public Choice Society in 1966. About the time he published Liberalism Against Populism, he was president of the American Political Science Association.

Riker defined populism as embracing two propositions: First, the "will of the people" ought to be government policy. Second, "the people are free when their wishes are law." As for liberalism, he conceived it as any democratic system that does not attach any sacrosanct character to the will of the people. Riker's approach to liberal democracy is close to what F.A. Hayek described in Law; Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (University of Chicago Press, 1979):

The true value of democracy is to serve as a sanitary precaution protecting us against an abuse of power. It enables us to get rid of a government and try to replace it by a better one. Or, to put it differently, it is the only convention we have yet discovered to make peaceful change possible. Social choice and the imperfection of voting / Which system is better, liberalism or populism? The theory of social choice is relevant to this question, Riker explains, because it analyzes how "tastes, preferences, or values of individual persons are amalgamated and summarized into the choice of a collective group or society." Social choice refers to the choices made through government--that is, political choices. The problem of populism, Riker argues, is that voting (elections and referenda)--or, for that matter, any other political aggregation of individual preferences--cannot reveal the will of the people or the content of the public interest, assuming that such things even exist.

Systems of voting and counting votes include majority voting, plurality voting, different methods of ranking candidates, and list voting in proportional representation systems. In the United States, one method of ranking candidates ("ranked-choice voting") is now used in some local elections and, in Maine, in state and federal elections, including for president. Two other states are considering adopting ranked-choice voting.

Different voting methods often produce different results. In fact, if you want a certain result from a given electorate, you can often find some voting system that would produce it. For that reason, there is no "objective" way to democratically choose the best voting method.

In the presence of three or more alternatives (candidates or issues), all voting methods violate at least one of a few basic technical or democratic-fairness criteria. One is monotonicity, which means that if one voter changes his mind in favor of an alternative, other things being equal, the social choice (aggregation) function should produce a result that does not increase the chances of another alternative. Undifferentiatedness or anonymity means that votes cannot be distinguished from one another: all voters are equal and anonymous. Neutrality requires that the voting system not favor one alternative over others. It has been mathematically demonstrated that majority voting between two alternatives, where one alternative gets more than 50% of the vote, is "the only method that simultaneously satisfies the criteria of monotonicity, undifferentiatedness, and neutrality," Riker notes. For example, if a...