The ideal political workflow

Abstract

This article presents the “ideal political workflow”, a social choice framework that distinguishes between beliefs (about reality) and (subjective) preferences. While well-behaved voting systems exist for repeated, identically distributed elections, they only reach their full potential when agents vote on outcomes (utility-relevant alternatives). If not, contradictions and paradoxes can occur, such as agents voting for unattainable states of nature or independent voting on interconnected issues leading to sub-optimal results. The ideal political workflow suggests the substitution of bureaucratic by competitive technocracy. Lastly, the Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics are reinterpreted to assert that competitive markets serve as the ideal political workflow for the delivery of private goods.

Keywords: Social choice, technocracy, mechanism design

JEL Classification: D71, D72