On the Possibility of Democracy and Rational Collective Choice

The paper challenges the 'orthodox doctrine' of collective choice
theory according to which Arrow’s 'general possibility theorem'
precludes rational decision procedures generally and implies that
in particular all voting procedures must be flawed. I point out
that all voting procedures are cardinal and that Arrow’s result,
based on preference orderings cannot apply to them. All voting
procedures that have been proposed, with the exception of approval
voting, involve restrictions on voters expressions of their
preferences. These restrictions, not any general impossibility, are
the cause of various well known pathologies. In the class of
unrestricted voting procedures I favor 'evaluative voting' under
which a voter can vote for or against any alternative, or abstain.
I give a historical/conceptual analysis of the origins of
theorists’ aversion to cardinal analysis in collective choice and
voting theories.