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Political Theory and Methodology
Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preferences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 237 pp., $31.95, ISBN 0 521 35043 3 (hbk); ISBN 0 521 58524 4 (pbk).
Democracy and Decision provides an insightful, wide-ranging and sustained study of the nature of voting and electoral choice. It should be read by all social scientists interested in these subjects. It should also be standard fare for any upper-level course in political science. There is material enough for several PhD dissertations.
Brennan and Lomasky make the argument that the behaviour of individuals in the market and the behaviour in the ballot box are systematically different. They call this a two hats thesis. They claim that individuals might be taken to be maximising some interest that is instrumentally defined when making choices in the market. In addition, they have an incentive to gather information and learn from the outcomes of previous choices. They say that the same assumption does not work for the analysis of voting because the institutional constraints on voters are not the same as those on buyers and sellers. Voting should be understood as an...