Taking dictatorship seriously: a reply to Quesada

Antonio Quesada (Public Choice 130:395–400, 2007 ) argues that a dictator has no more than two to three times the ‘average power’ of a non-dictatorial voter. If Quesada is correct, then his argument has major consequences for social choice theory; for instance, it warrants reconsidering the significance of Arrow’s Theorem. If Quesada is incorrect, however, then his position is dangerously misleading. This paper argues that Quesada is wrong. His argument depends on his own formal account of power, an account that is implausible because it disregards a basic insight common to the standard characterisations of voting power: the idea that one has power over an outcome to the extent that one is able to change that outcome. Claims about power have a counterfactual component; to assert that an individual actually has determined an outcome is also to make an assertion about what would have been the case had that individual acted differently. We can employ David Lewis’s influential account of counterfactuals to show, contra Quesada, that in a dictatorship, non-dictatorial individuals and groups cannot possibly determine a social preference. In short, Quesada is fundamentally mistaken about power, and thus also about the distribution of power in a dictatorship. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014