ABSTRACT
Having considered various types of voting agendas, this chapter now turns to the preferences of committee members. It reviews standard notation and assumptions, introduces several rather natural restrictions on preferences, and considers properties of the collective preferences of the whole committee. One variant of standard spatial preferences is especially simple and analytically tractable. A voter has Euclidean preferences if his preferences are based strictly on Euclidean distance, i.e. if, in comparing any two points in the space, he prefers the point closer to his ideal point to the point more distant from his ideal and is indifferent between points equidistant from his ideal. The notion of separability applies to multidimensional spatial preferences, given orthogonal axes defining the dimensions of the space and where each dimension represents an ‘issue’. Having examined individual voter preferences, the chapter considers collective preferences derived from preference profiles and, in particular, majority preference.
