Democracy and Social Choice

Catalog description

Course introduces students to the study of social choice and democratic theory. Social choice theory studies the properties of political institutions by which individual preferences are aggregated into collective choices. It provides a useful and powerful analytical framework to understand the choice and consequence of political institutions in democratic political systems. Topics include voting methods and theories, electoral systems, theoretical properties of social choice functions, strategic voting, voter qualifications, politics of suffrage, secret vs. open ballot, voting restrictions, representative districting, voting fraud, voting technology, etc.