Preference aggregation, functional pathologies, and democracy: A social choice defense of participatory democracy

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