ABSTRACT
In the intuitive understanding of many, democracy is foremost about voting. The aggregative account develops this intuition into a full-blown theory of democracy. It focuses on mechanisms for aggregating the preferences individuals express to a collective choice. The aggregative account gained importance in the contemporary literature in the form of an economic theory of democracy through the works of Duncan Black (1948, 1958) and Kenneth Arrow (1963). In this section, I shall give a brief description of this account, as well as discuss features of its theoretical background. I shall focus on Arrow’s framework for social choice theory, as it is arguably the most sophisticated account of aggregative democracy.
