In Memoriam

The fact that with three or more alternatives the social preference ordering may contain a top-cycle does not necessarily imply that it is impossible to amalgamate fairly the individual preferences into a reasonable social choice.

Dan Felsenthal was emeritus professor at the University of Haifa, CPNSS Research Associate, and VPP Co-Director at LSE, and a major contributor and active Co-Editor of the new VoteDemocracy international research initiative. In his early career, Dan published books and many papers on voting theory, voting behaviour and the application of game theory to politics. In the 1990s, Dan Felsenthal and Moshé Machover (F&M) began their professional collaboration researching various topics on voting power. Their now classic Measurement of Voting Power (1998) received unanimous praise from reviewers and, with the founding of VPP at LSE in 2000, helped to generate a mini renaissance internationally on voting power research. The F&M partnership resulted in a prodigious output of top-class papers culminating in their last book Electoral Systems (2012). The Festschrift Voting Power and Procedures (2014) honoured F&M for their enormous contribution towards the reawakening of the field of voting theory. The volume also contains an insightful interview of both authors on the development of their working partnership. In 2015 Dan began a new and highly successful collaboration with Hannu Nurmi that resulted in three books published successively in as many years. Both authors returned to themes they had worked on in the past to evaluate, in light of the most recent research, many voting procedures in terms of their ability to avoid the various paradoxes and pathologies that can afflict them. These books make an important contribution to voting theory both theoretical and practical. Taken together the three companion volumes provide an excellent overview of the most important advantages and disadvantages of the main voting procedures, thus helping decision makers to choose the most suitable. Dan’s energy, eagle-eyed attention to detail and thorough professionalism was particularly evident with his all-in support of the new VoteDemocracy research project. Until the very end, he was enthusiastically discussing ways the project could make the often quite technical content of voting theory more accessible to the non-specialist. We hope VoteDemocracy will prove a fitting tribute to his considerable intellectual efforts.

Rudolf Fara