Speaker: Dominik Klein (Utrecht University)
Date and Time: Thursday, April 24th 2025, 16:30-18:00
Venue: online only (not hybrid)
Title: Deliberation and consensus
Abstract. Deliberation and consensus play a central role in social epistemology and political theory. Although there has been a significant interest in axiomatic approaches to voting, deliberation and consensus are rarely studied in an axiomatic way. We consider several standard and new axioms for deliberation and consensus, and study whether deliberation and consensus conform to these axioms. Instead of exploring general impossibility results, we consider two specific formal model of deliberation: the bounded confidence model by Hegselmann and Krause and the linear pooling model of Lehrer and Wagner. We show that many axioms of deliberation and consensus are violated in these formal model of deliberation. We go on to argue that the violation of these axioms will likely occur in a wide class of models of deliberation and is not an artefact of the models studied.
(Joint work with Hein Duijf.)