Application of judgement aggregation theory to the process of political decision-making

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present an application of judgement aggregation theory to the process of political decision-making in the German Parliament. I introduce the logical framework of the theory, examine paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field and explain several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation. I formalize a historic vote of the German Parliament, as it agreed on moving the Parliament’s and the Government’s seat from Bonn to Berlin in 1991 and represent it in classical propositional logic. I apply the introduced conditions on the dynamic voting procedure and demonstrate that it satisfies the demanding condition of systematicity and violates the condition of universal domain due to the breach of deductive closure in the individual sets of judgements. Building on my results, I claim that this rationality constraint is neither essential nor desirable in the process of political decision-making. Moreover, I argue that the relaxation of deductive closure in the personal sets of judgements is an attractive strategy to avoid from the impossibility result in the situations of political decision-making in governmental institutions.