Servicenavigation

Project Details

Back

Projekt Print View

Collective Attitude Formation

Subject Area Theoretical Philosophy
Economic Theory
Term from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322895046
 
Final Report Year 2021

Final Report Abstract

ColAForm aimed at bridging the gap between two important paradigms in the theoretical modeling of the formation of collective attitudes: the deliberative and the aggregative views. On the deliberative view, group attitudes stem from a consensus reached after a structured exchange of opinions. On the aggregative view, group attitudes are formed by putting together the possibly diverging opinions of individuals through a formal voting procedure, for instance. The starting point of ColAForm was the simple observation that deliberation and aggregation are not competing but complementary approaches. These, however, had been mostly studied separately. This is an important limitation, which ColAForm aimed at overcoming. More precisely, it aimed at understanding how deliberation can help aggregation, for instance, by preventing preference cycles, and how aggregation can help correct some known pitfalls of deliberation. The project allowed, first, to pinpoint specific circumstances under which one can alleviate known limitations of aggregation by letting voters deliberate beforehand. Deliberation, as it turns out, is not a panacea for the shortcomings of aggregation. Only a methodologically plural deliberative process can provide sufficient robustness to secure the epistemic benefits of aggregation. Along the same lines, avoiding classical paradoxes of aggregation by deliberating beforehand requires the participants to be minimally open to changing their views upon learning the opinion of others. If they are not, deliberation can create incoherent group preferences. On the other hand, the project has unveiled some new drawbacks of deliberation that carefully designed aggregation methods could avoid. Important feedback loops that can prevent participants from arriving at better-informed opinions in deliberation have been, for instance, identified. However, it has been shown that there exist probabilistic aggregation methods that perform better, from a normative point of view, than what are arguably standard models and that these can help avoid some of the deliberative pitfalls otherwise identified in the project. The project featured five project-wide meetings, bringing together project members and leading scholars as invited speakers, and two additional project-wide talks. The scientific output of the project exceeds both quantitatively and qualitatively the deliverable presented in the proposal (21 papers in highest-ranked journals in philosophy, economics, and political science, as well as one special issue of Social Choice and Welfare edited by the two project PIs). Furthermore, the project contributed to consolidating the French-German collaboration between its members, leading to the placement of young researchers and fertile ideas for potential follow-up research proposals.

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

© 2024 DFG Disclaimer / Copyright / Privacy Policy

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung