Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments

The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the
aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than
the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must
first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been
unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and
unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either
context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is
the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would
better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to
advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called
utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their
cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins.
This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract
cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi.
On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general
elections.