 The voting methods discussed above have been judged on procedural grounds. This “proceduralist approach to collective decision making” is defined by Coleman and Ferejohn (1986, p. 7) as one that “identifies a set of ideals with which any collective decision-making procedure ought to comply. … [A] process of collective decision making would be more or less justifiable depending on the extent to which it satisfies them.” The authors add that a distinguishing feature of proceduralism is that “what justifies a [collective] decision-making procedure is strictly a necessary property of the procedure — one entailed by the definition of the procedure alone.” Indeed, the characterization theorems discussed in the previous section can be viewed as an implementation of this idea (cf. Riker 1982). The general view is to analyze voting methods in terms of “fairness criteria” that ensure that a given method is sensitive to all of the voters’ opinions in the right way. 