The notion of the “will of the people” has long been at the centre of populist conceptions of democracy, but it has taken on renewed salience in recent years, with the rise of populist movements. Following the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, for instance, references to “the will of the people” became ubiquitous in British politics.

Furthermore, the “will of the people” is often simply defined as the will of the majority. However, social choice theorists have long pointed out that this may be incoherent even if all individual wills are coherent – an insight known as Condorcet’s paradox. William Riker, in particular, used this insight and its generalisations, such as Arrow’s impossibility theorem, to argue that there is no satisfactory definition of the popular will as an aggregate of individual wills.
The aim of this paper is to revisit the social-choice-theoretic critique of populism.

We first reconstruct Riker’s critique in a philosophically more precise and technically upgraded form. And we then extend it, showing that even if we relax a crucial assumption at the heart of Riker’s critique – the assumption that the popular will “supervenes” on the individual wills – a more nuanced version of his basic point still stands. The upshot is that most versions of “realism” about the will of the people are subject to considerable challenges.

Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. List's research interests relate to social choice theory, formal epistemology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of social science.