Hannu Nurmi Libri

Focusing on the methodology of political economics, this book provides a comprehensive overview of core theories alongside recent advancements in the field. It aims to equip students with a solid foundation in political economy, exploring various models and their implications. The content is designed to foster critical thinking and understanding of both traditional and contemporary issues, making it an essential resource for those studying the intersection of politics and economics.

The book explores the complexities of decision-making in groups, particularly focusing on the impact of various voting procedures. It highlights how different methods can significantly influence outcomes, despite the common assumption that any voting process suffices. By evaluating a range of proposed and existing voting procedures against criteria of optimality, the author aims to guide readers in identifying the most suitable method for their specific decision-making contexts. The analysis emphasizes the importance of choosing the right procedure for effective group consensus.

Voting paradoxes present unexpected challenges in the electoral process, indicating potential flaws in how individual opinions are expressed or processed. These outcomes can appear bizarre, unfair, or implausible relative to voter sentiments. Historically significant in social choice theory, these paradoxes were recognized by early theorists like Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, who focused on minimizing such issues. The Condorcet paradox, a notable example, has become central in discussions of voting anomalies, but it is just one among many. This work aims to highlight the variety of voting paradoxes and their interconnections, offering a classification system for better understanding. Additionally, it seeks to explore methods for addressing these paradoxes, which are crucial to the functioning of democratic systems. Investigating how past and contemporary voting methods tackle these challenges is essential, as is discovering strategies to reduce the likelihood of paradoxes occurring. While some paradoxes may be inevitable, the goal is to enhance the integrity of the voting process.

Focusing on 20 voting procedures for electing a single winner, this book evaluates their effectiveness in avoiding five significant paradoxes, particularly when a Condorcet winner is present. It complements two earlier volumes by the same authors, providing a thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various voting methods. The insights aim to guide decision makers in selecting the most suitable voting procedure for their needs, ensuring informed choices in electoral processes.

The evaluation of 18 voting procedures focuses on key monotonicity-related criteria within fixed and variable electorates. It examines how these procedures handle voter preferences and includes discussions on monotonicity failures and the no-show paradoxes. The relationship between these paradoxes and the existence of a Condorcet winner is also explored. This book is aimed at scholars and students in social choice, providing detailed examples and explanations of the vulnerabilities in different voting systems.

We live in an uncertain world, is a truism most of us hear more often than we would like. What one usually means to say by this is that we do not know what will happen in the future. Since changes, even major ones, have occurred in the past, it is possible that they will occur again in the future. In politics institutions are ways of coping with continuity and change. In democratic systems the electoral institutions provide ways of peaceful adjustment to changes in popular opinions. This book is about uncertainty as it pertains to electoral institutions. We shall deal with the ways in which analytic models are capable of taking into account voter uncertainty, ignorance and incompetence. We shall also discuss how uncertainty pertains to electoral outcomes. Given voter opinions, there is often a wide variation in the possible electoral outcomes. This could be called procedure-dependence of outcomes. Its existence shows that uncertainty is not something that can characterize only future events. It can pertain to past ones as well. This work is part of the Democracy and Constitution Project of Center for Business and Policy Studies (SNS). The idea of writing a book on the performance of voting procedures under uncertain cir cumstances came up in my correspondence with Dr. Per Molander of SNS a few years ago.