impossibility theorem

impossibility theorem, in political science, the thesis that it is generally impossible to assess the common good. It was first formulated in Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) by Kenneth J. Arrow, who was awarded (with Sir John R. Hicks) the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1972 partially in recognition of his work on the theorem. As a central element of rational choice theory, which attempts to explain political behaviour as the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, the impossibility theorem posed a major challenge to 20th-century welfare economics and to a reevaluation of how democratic decision procedures arrive at representative expressions of individuals’ preferences. It has also been used to challenge the concept of “the public” as a meaningful social entity.

The impossibility theorem assumes that agents have complete and well-ordered preferences over all the outcomes under consideration in a collective choice situation. This requires that agents know whether they prefer one in any pair of possible outcomes, and it requires that agents’ preferences obey the logical relationship of transitivity, which requires that if Adams is preferred to Madison and Madison is preferred to Washington, then Washington cannot be preferred to Adams. The impossibility theorem considers cases in which three or more agents make a collective choice from three or more alternatives in situations as diverse as democratic voting, establishing public policies that reflect social welfare, and the marketplace. The theorem is constructed to resolve the question of whether there is any mathematical procedure for amalgamating individual preferences that results in a collectively rational preference ordering of all the possible outcomes.

In addition to assuming that individuals’ preferences are rational, the theorem stipulates that four minimal conditions must apply to the decision procedure for its result to be valid. The theorem requires that individuals be permitted to have any rational preference ordering over alternatives, that there not be a single dictator whose preference over a single pair of alternatives holds for the group decision, that the collective ranking over outcomes remains unchanged if one of the alternatives ceases to be considered, and that a unanimous preference over a pair of outcomes implies a collective preference over that pair. These requirements are generally regarded as beyond controversy.

The theorem proves that, given these minimal assumptions, it is impossible to construct any procedure that results in a collectively rational expression of individual desires. Though highly technical in its statement, the theorem has important implications for philosophies of democracy and political economy. The theorem rejects the notion of a collective democratic will, whether derived through civic deliberation or construed by experts who paternalistically apply knowledge of what is best for a population. The theorem also denies that there could be objective basic needs or universal criteria that any procedure for collective decision making should recognize, such as minimal nutrition standards or human rights.