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Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and Coherent Aggregation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2021

SOROUSH RAFIEE RAD Open the ORCID record for SOROUSH RAFIEE RAD [Opens in a new window]  and
OLIVIER ROY Open the ORCID record for OLIVIER ROY [Opens in a new window]
SOROUSH RAFIEE RAD*
Affiliation:
Bayreuth University
OLIVIER ROY*
Affiliation:
Bayreuth University
*
Soroush Rafiee Rad, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Philosophy, Bayreuth University, Soroush.R.Rad@gmail.com.
Olivier Roy, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bayreuth University, Olivier.Roy@uni-bayreuth.de.
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Abstract

Rational deliberation helps to avoid cyclic or intransitive group preferences by fostering meta-agreements, which in turn ensures single-peaked profiles. This is the received view, but this paper argues that it should be qualified. On one hand we provide evidence from computational simulations that rational deliberation tends to increase proximity to so-called single-plateaued preferences. This evidence is important to the extent that, as we argue, the idea that rational deliberation fosters the creation of meta-agreement and, in turn, single-peaked profiles does not carry over to single-plateaued ones, and the latter but not the former makes coherent aggregation possible when the participants are allowed to express indifference between options. On the other hand, however, our computational results show, against the received view, that when the participants are strongly biased towards their own opinions, rational deliberation tends to create irrational group preferences, instead of eliminating them. These results are independent of whether the participants reach meta-agreements in the process, and as such they highlight the importance of rational preference change and biases towards one’s own opinion in understanding the effects of rational deliberation.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 629 - 648
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the editors and reviewers of the APSR for their careful consideration of the paper, especially in the midst of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, and their valuable comments that improved the paper significantly. The paper has also benefited immensely from comments by Alexandru Baltag, Christian List, Stefan Napel, Clemens Puppe, Jan-Willem Romeijn, and the participants in Philosophy Breakfast meeting at Bayreuth University and the ColAForm meetings in London, Paris, and Copenhagen.

Both authors’ work is in part supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) as part of the joint project Collective Attitude Formation [RO 4548/8-1].

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