ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the theory of committee voting pioneered by Duncan Black and advanced by Robin Farquharson. It is fair to say that, within the framework established by Black and Farquharson, the theory of committee voting is now largely complete and most of its results have been covered here. The major gap lies in the area of agenda formation processes. Even here important progress has been made, but a decisive and complete treatment requires consideration of procedural and institutional details beyond the scope of the original Black-Farquharson formulation. And a more general treatment of committee voting needs to go beyond the Black-Farquharson framework by taking account of the environment of incomplete information in which committee members typically operate. Other monographs in this series begin this task.
