The theory of social choice is very rich in topics and issues that have been discussed since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal contribution in 1951. This keynote chapter is only able to deal with only a few of them. The start is Arrow’s impossibility theorem, two routes that escape from this negative result and the issue of whether there are some properties that should be satisfied by every aggregation rule in order to qualify as desirable. Next, the literature on individual liberty and rights is related to the notion of freedom in the sense of control over one’s functioning bundle. Then the procedural aspect of individual and collective choice, often mentioned but not worked out in detail, is discussed. Finally, a particular approach to measure and compare capability sets is proposed.

The main objective of this chapter is to show how informational pluralism can be used within Sen’s social choice framework (SSC). In order to tackle this issue, two steps are necessary. First, it is important to spell out the ‘generalizability’ assumption behind Sen’s principle of working with broad informational spaces. Second, we need to work out a method to make sense of the need to conciliate different informational spaces. By doing so, several features and issues of the capability approach can be seen as part of a systematic story. Thus, this chapter is divided into four parts. The first part explores the generalizability issue behind the capability approach. The second provides a brief characterization of Sen’s social choice approach. The third part demonstrates how it can be used through what can be named ‘generalizability tables’. Finally, the chapter briefly concludes with some suggestions for future work.

This chapter addresses the questions of how policy choices to improve education might be addressed by looking across social choice theory, public choice theory and capability approaches. The intention is to try and understand how to evaluate innovative programmes that are set up to improve the chances of the most disadvantaged children, and why these well-intentioned programmes continue to face challenges in terms of ensuring a scaling-up procedure. The chapter draws on an evaluative study undertaken in 2014 and 2015 to examine the dissemination and scaling up of the educationally innovative Activity Based Learning (ABL) programme in Tamil Nadu, India, to improve the retention rates and learning outcomes of children from challenging socio-economic backgrounds. The studys aim was to compare the manner and rolling out of the programme in Tamil Nadu with ABL programmes elsewhere, and to ascertain the extent to which they had been successful.

The aim of this chapter is to explore how social choice theory and the capability approach can help in clarifying important ethical dilemmas and issues of injustice that need to be addressed for cities to become sustainable cities. Six types of important injustices are identified, covering both intra- and intergenerational fairness. Some important criticisms of smart cities are considered and important safeguards and policy priorities for smart cities from the social choice and capability approach framings are identified. The main message of this chapter is that the sustainability of cities is an ethical issue and not one of technology or measurement, and it is all about the six types of injustices, with cities needing to tackle all six of them in their quest to become sustainable. Nudging and smart cities can help, but these must be contextualized to prioritize participation and equality. Social choice theory as formulated by Amartya Sen provides important insights to understand and deal with conflicts between the different demands on the freedoms of different individuals.

This chapter provides an overview of the books main issues and how they constitute a key narrative for understanding the links between Amartya Sens social choice theory (SCT) and other elements of his capability approach. It invites its readers to a long interdisciplinary journey, from an acknowledgement of the SCT features in Sen’s work to rich analytical categories that expand the core of SCT towards new forms of social theorizing. More specifically, it reviews the main features of Sen’s SCT and discusses a wide range of issues related to collective choices and individual values, such as those of consensus building, institutional change, identity perceptions, inclusiveness, notions of agency, the role of moral sentiments and emotions in shaping social choice, an ethics of sufficiency versus an ethics of optimal social capability, the influence of psychological aspects on individuals’ choices and the role of social structures in shaping people’s social priorities. It covers a wide range of empirical cases, and advances a proposal for a broader notion of social choice that can be richer, more interdisciplinary and more useful to human development theory and policies.

Drawing on an education project conducted in northern Nigeria, this chapter considers how social choices can be made and legitimized when different groups contributing to them hold significantly different views. Social identity theory is employed to understand the perceived and relative values individuals have of themselves and others. Social choice theory is then used to explore the influence of those valuations on meaningful social choices, specifically here the choice of groups of educators to work together to improve educational policies and practices. The development of capabilities, illustrated here by the professional capabilities of those educators, is traced through these theories. Although it has this very specific empirical focus, by making use of social identity and social choice theories, this chapter contributes to the wider understanding of individual freedoms to enhance the well-being of others through collective decision making.

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.

For most of human history, societies were divided into the rulers and the ruled. Citizens were subjects of their governments and were obligated to obey the orders of their rulers. Enlightenment ideas changed the way that citizens viewed their relationship to government. The view that citizens were subjects of their governments and obligated to serve their governments was reversed, so people increasingly thought that government should serve its citizens rather than the other way around. Democratic political institutions that increasingly were adopted as a result can act as a constraint on those who hold government power, but they also convey legitimacy to the exercise of that power. Democratic political institutions create the illusion that the political elite are accountable to the masses. Meanwhile, the masses, who have an incentive to be rationally ignorant about public policy measures, adopt their public policy views from those offered them by the elite.

The process values of majoritarianism, pluralism, and collective rationality are described.The social choice understanding that it is impossible to respect all three of these values with a single collective decision mechanism is considered, as are epistemic and deliberative theories of democracy.

Social choice is concerned with the selection of an ideal (or social) option, which can be a so-called ‘social state’, or a social ‘utility’, or a social ‘preference’, or a social choice ‘set’, on the basis of individual utilities, or individual utility functions, or individual preferences, or individual choice sets, or individual choice functions. A number of scholars have outlined the limited aspect of the notion of utility, including, notably and pre-eminently, Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum. Although they did not put it in such a strong phrase, the basic idea is to replace the notion of utility by the notion of capability (leaving aside ‘happiness’, a notion which for many is hardly distinguishable from utility). As has been remarked by Mozaffar Qizilbash, the development of the capability approach has been focused on the capability of an individual; and the idea of amalgamating or aggregating individual data is consubstantial with social choice. The purpose of this text is to propose some preliminary ideas regarding the aggregation of individual capabilities.