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Democratic simple majority voting is perhaps the most widely used method of group decision making in our time. Current theory, based on instability theorems, predicts that a group employing this method will almost always fail to reach a stable conclusion. There is one case that the classical instability theorems do not treat: an even number of voters in 2 dimensions. We resolve this remaining case, proving that instability occurs with probability converging rapidly to 1 as the population increases. But empirical observations do not support the gloomy predictions of the instability theorems. We show that the instability theorems are themselves unstable in the following sense: if the model of voter behavior is altered however slightly to incorporate any of several plausible characteristics of decision-making, then the instability theorems do not hold and in fact the probability of stability converges to 1 as the population increases, when the population is sampled from a centered distribution. The assumptions considered are: a cost of change; bounded rationality; perceptual thresholds; a cost of uncertainty; a discrete proposal space, and others. One consequence of this work is to render precise and rigorous the solution proposed by Tullock (63,64) and refined by Arrow (2) to the impossibility problem. The stability results all hold for arbitrary dimension, and generalize to establish a tradeoff between the characteristics and the degree of noncenteredness of a population. As a by-product of the analysis, we establish the statistical consistency of the sample yolk radius ; National Research Council and National Science Foundation ; http://archive.org/details/instabilityofins00tove ; OM&N Direct Funding ; NA ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Political instability; civil-military conflict; economic problems. Outlook for the double round of presidential elections scheduled for Jan. and May 1988; external debt; the petroleum industry.

Discusses Israel's use of military force in the West Bank to counter the Palestinian intifada, with emphasis on regional security in the Middle East and response of the international community and the US.

For nearly sixty years, the regime in Rangoon has remained in power by preventing democratic change and waging war against the country's numerous ethnic nationality parties. This is the oldest ongoing conflict in the world. At the end of May, in response to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's appeal to free Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize winning pro-democracy activist, the military regime extended her house arrest for at least another year. This step is the latest demonstration of the unwillingness of the military regime to share power. As a direct consequence of the fighting and in response to sustained and widespread human rights violations throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been displaced and huge numbers of refugees have fled to neighbouring countries.