Group deliberation and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result

Abstract

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility result: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility result and argue that successful group deliberation must be 'holistic': individuals cannot generally revise their judgments on a proposition based on judgments on that proposition alone but must take other propositions into account too. I discuss the signi…cance of these …ndings for democratic theory