A Pooling Approach to Judgment Aggregation

The literature has focused on a particular way of aggregating judgments: Given a set of yes or no questions or issues, the individuals’ judgments are then aggregated separately, issue by issue. Applied in this way, the majority method does not guarantee the logical consistency of the set of judgments obtained. This fact has been the focus of critiques of the majority method and similar procedures. This paper focuses on another way of aggregating judgments. The main difference is that aggregation is made en bloc on all the issues at stake. The main consequence is that the majority method applied in this way does always guarantee the logical consistency of the collective judgments. Since it satisfies a large set of attractive properties, it should provide the basis for more positive assessment if applied using the proposed pooling approach than if used separately. The paper extends the analysis to the pooling supermajority and plurality rules, with similar results.