Fuzzy social choice models. Explaining the government formation process (Q2515030)

This book studies the use of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic to model social choice. It develops a new approach to model error in preferences coding. Fuzzy sets are constructed employing distributions derived from a bootstrap resampling procedure. Empirical findings on the prediction of the outcome of government formation processes are presented. The fuzzy approach is applied to the data of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) related to European parliamentary and semi-presidential systems. Predictions derived from the fuzzy maximal set of possible outcomes are obtained for one-dimensional and two-dimensional models. These predictions are compared with those derived from other models and with the government actually formed. For the one-dimensional case, predictions derived from the fuzzy Pareto set are also built and present the best fit.