Committees, Agendas, and Voting
Nicholas R. Miller
A volume in the Section on Political Science Economics (edited by J. Ferejohn)
This monograph surveys the formal literature on committee voting building on the pioneering work by Duncan Black and Robin Farquharson. Committee voting is voting of the parliamentary type, in which collective choice proceeds through a sequence of binary (e.g., yes/no) choices. The literature on committee voting has developed within the framework of economic theory, game theory, social choice theory, and spatial voting theory. The chapters here focus on vote counting rules, voting agendas, voter preferences, sincere and sophisticated voting strategies, solution sets, voting outcomes, agenda control, and agenda formation. The author has himself made prior research contributions to a number of these topics. The exposition tries to be technically precise but at the same time reasonably accessible, and it is carried forward by means of numerous examples. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researcher in economics and political science.
About the author
Nicholas R. Miller received his B.A. in government from Harvard College and his M.A. and Ph.D in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the faculty of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. His research has focused on collective decision making and, in particular, formal theories of voting processes. He has written articles on logrolling and vote trading, majority voting and the uncovered set, coalition formation, power, pluralism and social choice, information pooling, agenda control, and spatial voting models.
About the series
Fundamentals of Pure Applied Economics is an international series that will appeal to economists in academia, government and business. New findings by leading experts are published rapidly and concisely at a level accessible to economists outside a given specialty. The series is divided by discipline into sections, each with its own editor, and publishes volumes as they are received. The sections and editors are listed inside. Individual volumes will later be compiled by section, revised, and published for easy reference as the Encyclopedia of Economics.
ISBN: 3-7186-5569-1
ISSN: 0191-1708
Harwood Academic Publishers (a member of the Gordon and Breach Publishing Group).
See review essay by G. B. Keene, "Putting the Theory of Committee Voting on the Agenda," Social Choice and Welfare (1998) 15: 469-480