Michael Dummett on social choice and voting

Michael Dummett worked on the theoretical aspects of aggregation of individual preferences and on the strategic aspects of voting theory. He also extended Black’s analysis of single-peaked preferences for majority rule to the case of voting games (majority games), offering a greater flexibility for the expression of voters’ preferences. He is also with Donald Saari one of the major advocates of the use of Borda’s rule in actual voting. In two books and a paper, he proposed many examples showing the advantages and defects of many voting rules used in the world

From mental patient to service user: deinstitutionalisation and the emergence of the Mental Health Service User Movement in Scotland, 1971-2006

Until recently research on the history of psychiatry was largely focused on the institutions where this controversial branch of medicine emerged, on its practitioners, treatments, theories and clinical practices, and the shifting social, institutional and legal contexts in which it has developed. Two pioneering figures in the histories of psychiatry and medicine, Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, opened the historiographical field up to much broader perspectives, expanding the range of sources and interpretations to encompass a wide-lens focus on matters such as the relationships between histories of madness and rationality, ‘the patient’s view’ and ‘anti-authority struggles’ by psychiatric patients. The study undertaken here seeks to develop aspects of the historiographical approaches advanced by Foucault and Porter by investigating how psychiatric patients engaged in collective action and campaigned for reform to mental health services in late twentieth-century Scotland. Through an excavation, description and analysis of untapped archival and oral history sources, I chart the spaces of emergence and trace the intersecting lines of descent of the ‘Scottish user movement’ in the era of deinstitutionalisation. By examining the records of patient groups and oral history interviews with activists, I reveal how this small but significant social movement was formed through the interplay between top-down social and governmental practices and bottom-up resistance and action by patients. The study makes visible the characters, voices, settings, events and actions, which made up the changing discursive and social practices of patients groups in Scotland over the last half-century