Preference Aggregation, Functional Pathologies, and Democracy: A Social Choice Defense of Participatory Democracy

Riker (1982) and others maintain that the general impossibility of aggregating individual preferences into consistent collective choices implies that liberalism is "the only kind of democracy actually attainable". We argue that the implications of impossibility theorems are consistent with, and implied by, the logic of the participatory conception of democracy. In this view, the democratic method is justified not because it necessarily produces decisions that are adequate representations of public preferences, but because the participation implicit in the method contributes to the development of human capabilities. Given that the impossibility results derived from the theory of voting thus suggest more, rather than less, democracy, they may be viewed as functional rather than pathological.