By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Sept 2:
This Sunday (1 September 2024), I had a telephonic updating of personal information and sharing of opinions with a good old friend of mine – an Economist from Gujarat. He did share information on many happenings and expressed his explanation on why these happenings; he even uttered that I could have a different opinion, but he was very emphatic on his views. I was struck by a statement of him: “Failure of governance is deepening while corruption is widening.” It is a very powerful statement and I was immediately awe-struck by his views on what get deepened and widened in contemporary national scenario; I could not have a different opinion.
During the last nearly two years, Manipur has been experiencing the absence of any coherent display of government action, and instead witnessing the statements of pretentions for social welfare measures getting galore in lieu of concrete implementation of measures for social peace and cohesion. Now during the last two weeks or so, the proclaimed leaders of a community group have put forth before the public – in interviews with the media personnel – certain demands purporting to be the social desires of their community; the articulations lack both maturity and cohesion. Now two things are very clearly coming out to the viewing world on what has been happening in Manipur during the last eighteen months or so. First, the Head of the People in Manipur is an exemplary case of a leader having no hesitance in uttering incoherent statements. Second, the leaders of the community demanding separation from Manipur are getting increasingly exposed with their malicious intentions; their articulations pretend to be for a social cause, but their hidden agenda are easily revealed by the “concealing” statements they make.
My friend from Gujarat was making the statement mentioned in the first paragraph, but I felt the heightened power of it in the context of Manipur. The last two weeks, I was getting increasingly reminded by the happenings in Manipur of what we had learnt in Political Economy as the Condorcet Paradox and the Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It is exactly at this moment that I had a talk with my friend and he was non-stoppable.
In a context where there is a need for exercise of collective choice/social choice, the Condorcet Paradox is a situation often referred by the political economists. The concept was first developed by Ramon Llull – a Spanish philosopher and theologian – in the thirteenth century while examining church governance. But his work was rediscovered by a mathematician and political philosopher Marquis de Condorcet in the late eighteenth century. “In its most simple form the paradox features three players, three alternatives, and players’ preferences such that a pairwise vote over the alternatives results in a Condorcet cycle: one pair of players prefers the second alternative to the third alternative, another pair of players prefers the first alternative to the second alternative, and a third pair of players prefers the third alternative to the first alternative. Whether and how players reach an agreement in this case is an open issue.” Thus elections may not yield a clear outcome. Here it would be relevant to recall what Jean Charles de Borda put to the French Academy of Science on June 16, 1770 to widen the applicability of the concept: “In conclusion, I must stress that everything we have said here about elections also applies to any debate conducted by any company or body of men; these debates are really no more than a type of election between the different options put forward and are therefore subject to the same rules”; this is known in the literature as Borda Rule.
What Manipur experiences today is not one of non-clarity of collective choice under democracy. There is a Council of Ministers which should exercise the majority decision. The majority decision would be based on what Kenneth Arrow termed as Aggregation of Individual Decisions to arrive at a Social Decision as Joe Leventis puts: “Preference Aggregation Rule – This is essentially a fancy name for a voting system. It is so called because it takes in each individual’s preferences and aggregates them into a single set of preferences (called the “social preferences”, since they attempt to represent the aggregated preferences of society). For a single-winner election, the most preferred option in these social preferences is considered to have won the vote. So a Preference Aggregation Rule should function in this way: Given a set of distinct options, e.g. , it will aggregate the set {5Ø4Ü, 5Ø5Ü, 5Ø6Ü} of all individual preferences (individual preferences, such as individual 5ØVÜ prefers option 5Ø4Ü to option 5Ø5Ü, are denoted > ), e.g. , and output the social preferences (often 5ØVÜ {>1, >2, >3, >4, >5} denoted >*), e.g. 5Ø5Ü > 5Ø4Ü > 5Ø6Ü.”
The preferences should satisfy the principle of Transitivity: “The preferences must not “loop”. This means that given a set of distinct options, e.g. {5Ø4Ü, 5Ø5Ü, 5Ø6Ü}, it must not be possible for 5Ø5Ü >* 5Ø4Ü and 5Ø4Ü >* 5Ø6Ü, but 5Ø6Ü >* 5Ø5Ü.”
Further there should be Unanimity: “If all individuals prefer one option to another, then the social preferences should prefer that option to the other.”
Still further, there is the condition of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA): “Whether 5Ø4Ü is preferred to 5Ø5Ü or not in the social preferences must depend only on individuals’ preferences between 5Ø4Ü and 5Ø5Ü, and not any other factor. This means that if, from the set of options {5Ø4Ü, 5Ø5Ü}, 5Ø4Ü >* 5Ø5Ü, then the introduction of another option, 5ØLÜ, to the set, must not be able make it so that 5Ø5Ü >* 5Ø4Ü.”
Arrow pointed out that arriving at such a collective choice decision may be impossible, and the role of Dictatorship arises here “where the social preferences do not take all voters into account and instead mimic the preferences of one individual.”
Manipur has almost been like having this Arrow solution despite the presence of a Council of Ministers. The manifestation of governance has been only the presence of an individual in the form of the Head of the People. But unlike what Arrow suggested to convert the Impossibility into Possibility, what Manipur has been experiencing is one where the Head of the People is very indeterminate – his incoherence is a most visible sign. Thus Manipur now have a Government which performs no Governance, and, since there is no Governance, it is as if there is no Government. There is no Paradox, but Impossibility is being displayed.
