On the transmission of democratic values

Abstract

We study whether democratic values that govern the preferences over social choice rules are subject to intergenerational transmission. We focus on five social choice rules, namely, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, the Majoritarian Compromise, Borda Rule and Social Com-promise, that represent very diverse values about how to extract public will out of individ-ual opinions. In our experiment, students and their parents are confronted with hypothet-ical preference profiles and are asked to decide which alternative should be chosen for the society. The design of the hypothetical preference profiles allows us to interpret a subject's choice of an alternative as her revealed preference for one of the focused social choice rules. We find significant differences between the rules most often chosen by the parents (Majoritarian Compromise and Plurality) and those by the students (Social Compromise). Analyzing the relation between the preferences over social choice rules for each parent -offspring pair, we find support for the hypothesis of parental transmission of preferences.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.