This chapter focuses on academic models of collective choice. It discusses voting models and models of social choice to show that the link between instrumental preferences and collective choice outcomes is broken once one recognizes that the political preferences of citizens and voters are expressive, so do not represent the outcomes they most prefer. The models themselves are not wrong, in that they describe the way that expressed preferences are aggregated to make collective decisions. But the interpretation of the models often is mistaken. There is no clear relationship between outcomes of collective decision-making processes and the outcomes that would be preferred by those whose preferences are being aggregated.

This chapter lays out some of the basic aspects of how political institutions identify and aggregate the preferences of their constituents. Most democratic political systems use elections to aggregate preferences, and the contours of those political systems are mapped out in a number of voting rights. Voting rights, though, are not unidimensional: they cover everything from casting a ballot to ensuring that ballots are properly weighted to policing the very ability to place alternatives on a ballot in the first place. At the core of all these rights, though, is the recognition that voting should be tied in some way to a person's interest, or stake, in the outcome of an election. Because there are problems with relying upon self-reports of that interest, democratic institutions typically rely upon markers of that interest that allow them to identify and regulate those voting rights. Those markers, though, need to be both accurate descriptions of voter interest (not over- or underinclusive) and manageable.

This chapter critically examines the rise of board primacy as an alternative theory of firm governance. The chapter begins by categorizing such theorists as either “wise ruler” theorists or “long-term interest” theorists. In either case, board primacy theorists have responded to the revelation that shareholders, like other corporate constituents, have quite heterogeneous preferences not by extending voting rights to those constituents but by further distancing the shareholder electorate from real corporate decision-making. Their move conflates two different aspects of group decision-making processes: the responsiveness of the system and composition of the electorate. And by holding fast to exclusive shareholder voting, the theorists have just further detached their governance structures from the underlying preferences of corporate constituents without substituting anything in their place. We should instead investigate treating other constituents more like shareholders rather than the other way around.