“Democracy generates the appearance of uncertainty because it is a system of decentralized strategic action in which knowledge is inescapably local.”
Adam Przeworski1
This quotation sums up various assumptions of importance for this thesis. Those engaging in decentralised strategic action shall be called political actors. Their actions are decentralised since they are theoretically independent of each other in their decisions, regardless of what exactly such an actor is. They are strategic since actors mutually take the perceived and expected actions of other actors into consideration when devising their own strategy. Thus the individual independence of their decisions becomes limited. Knowledge is local, it is imperfect, hence better enabling some actors for expedient strategic action than others.
Why do political actors even have to engage in the system thatPrzeworskidescribes as one of uncertainty?
Political actors do so because they are in competition, attempting to devise better strategies and subsequent actions than their competitors. I use the hardly helpful termbetter deliberately. A more appropriate one is the term used above, expedient. We can agree that in a democracy every citizen is free to engage or not to engage in politics, to vote or not to vote. I assume that any citizen who does engage has some preferred notions of where politics should lead her or his society in the future. Furthermore, democracy offers the possibility for any citizen to run for political office or not to run for political office. In said office that very citizen is subsequently able to try and implement policies in pursuit of held convictions. She or he becomes a political leader.
This leads to another basic assumption. In order to achieve any goal, any political leader is in need of holding political office (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2002). Thus, any given political leader has a natural incentive to do what she or he can to remain in office. One might grant an exception to the case when leaders wish to leave office for some reason. However, if a leader does not wish to do so, thus is still in pursuit of achieving
1See Przeworski 1991, 12.
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some goal, she or he will wish to stay in office. In a democracy this amounts to being reelected. Bueno de Mesquita et al. point to the importance of a political leader’swinning coalition necessary for the leader to secure his tenure. As long as this coalition is satisfied the leader’s tenure rests secured. In a democratic system thewinning coalitionconsists of those voters which cast their vote in favour of a respective leader. Securing the allegiance of just enough voters to remain in office will make those voters the winning coalition. This is vital as it points to the eventual irrelevance of the electorate’s remainder to that political leader’s considerations.
Here, these considerations mean plans as towards whose interests the leader shall gear her or his policies. The political leader has to decide as whose agent she or he shall act. The additional value of Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s concept lies in the fact that it reaches beyond the realm of democracy. Dictators and autocrats have and need a winning coalition just as political leaders in democracies do. They may not retain their agent in office by means of elections but they surely are vital in her or his survival in office.
In order to secure the coalition’s support, the political leader must choose his policy projects accordingly.
However, it does not suffice to bluntly act in this one group’s interest, least so in a democratic system. A leader may alienate other groups comprising the electorate beyond indifference and into antagonism. It seems, maintaining the coalition indeed as a winning coalition will make other groups’ antagonism obsolete. Yet in a democracy, a political leader holding office is necessarily faced not only with a coalition she or he has to maintain. The leader is moreover faced with competition which, in a democracy, may be calledinstitutionalised competition. The competition of opinions and political actors is inherent to any genuinely democratic system.
Thus competition is staged by other political actors seeking to become leaders. Such a competing political actor may try to and succeed in instrumentalising the antagonism of parts of the electorate which are not part of the incumbent’s winning coalition. Hence, this competing political actor can unite these parts against the incumbent and form a more powerful - in a democracy, larger - winning coalition to end the incumbent’s tenure in office.
This is the main reason why a political leader in a democracy must never be too biased in her or his favour for thewinning coalitionalone. The political leader chooses his policy projects strategically. In developing these strategies, the political leader tries to foresee both the electorate’s as well as the competitors’ reactions to his actions. Of course, the leader may be in the position of needing to react to these other actors’ actions herself or himself. A successful political leader’s deeds are never isolated from others, neither in the considerations they are based on nor in actions themselves. It is a reciprocal system of various political actors choosing their strategies and actions in consideration of other actors’ perceived actions and strategies. Thus, a system with the “appearance of uncertainty”, asPrzeworskiput it, for any single actor emerges.
The preceding paragraph sums up some of the very tenets of game theory. In terms of game theory I shall refer to participating actors as players. If any player P1 is about to make a decision, that player will compare the different strategies available and the likely outcomes connected to each strategy. As P1 is not necessarily the only player participating in a game, P1 has to consider other players’ actions as well. Another player, for example P2, will consider P1’s strategies, when looking at own strategies and making subsequent decisions. In
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2.1. GAME THEORY AND DEMOCRACY short, for any Pxit is advisable to consider other players’ outcomes and thus strategies and actions. Labeling a strategy as “advisable” of course presupposes that players act rationally, an important assumption of game theory (Morrow 1994, 7). This means any Px is inclined towards choosing an option that will yield the best possible outcome given what the others are expected to do.
This short, schematic example quite obviously only introduces an ideally simple game of two players with simultaneous decision-making. It is very unlikely to live up to the possibly infinitely complex interdependencies in real-life scenarios. Still, game theory argues that even in games depicting real-life scenarios single decisions by players can be distinguished. In any case it seems to be a simplification of reality, a criticism that may easily be mounted against game theory. Yet, some simplification in order to make our overly complex reality more accessible can also prove to be rewarding. Any game theorist will also have to detailedly and transparently describe and reason with how players, strategies and subsequent outcomes were identified.
The feasibility of putting outcomes into definite and measurable terms is in need of further discussion. I can presuppose that all players participating in a given game measure their outcomes connected to any strategy in the same given unit of measurement. I can presuppose that this unit suffices for describing the payoffs of all given outcomes of the game. Such a unit may for example be money, or any single currency to be precise. A game with one unit to measure all outcomes occurring in the game obviously provides for a desirable degree of comparability and traceability. It is also a reason why laboratory games often work with monetary incentives for their subjects. Anyhow, regarding real-life scenarios and games based on them, this may again be an unlikely case.
Considering games taking place in the political processes of a democratic system, one can think of units of measurement other than monetary ones that might be needed. Some examples are voter turnout, amount of party members or actives and public approval or disapproval in surveys on certain issues. These are only the outcomes that can be counted in numbers and thus clearly measured. Combining and weighing different goods and thus units of measurement against each other seems far more challenging. Furthermore, outcomes can yield goods that cannot even be measured with existing units of measurement. The list of these seems endless.
For example one can think of a player’s satisfaction, be it moral or otherwise, feelings of patriotism or gains and losses in security. Here, the interpretability of terms such assecurity is not even considered yet. Thus, in complex scenarios even outcomes as such can be complex. If one does not succeed in depicting outcomes in measurable definite terms, one may still try to rank outcomes by appeal to any given player, by theirutility to Px.
Given the possible problems with the measurement of outcomes, the use of the termsobjective andsubjective demands clarification. Precisely measurable outcomes suggest Px’s outcome yielding the best results for her or him as objectively the best one. However, if outcomes of Px contain aspects that are not measurable in definite terms, a best outcome for Px may rather besubjectively the best one. By this it becomes conceivable that players’ rational behaviour, in which game theory puts considerable trust, does not necessarily reflect in a player’s outcome and subsequent utility derived from it. Thus a premature focus on objectively best
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outcomes may miss important parts of Px’s outcomes and hence considerations. In fact, the simultaneous existence of bothobjective andsubjective criteria for voting decisions by single voters and its impact on research design have been noted (Lewis-Beck, Stegmaier 2000, 186-188). It is comprehensible that the existence of both objective and subjective measurements shall be accepted for both pre-decision criteria and post-decision outcomes. Furthermore, it is reasonable to grant such measurements not only to members of the electorate but to any Px involved in a game. Regarding the electorate, the connection between game theory as a whole and retrospective voting in particular becomes apparent. Obviously, the inclusion ofsubjective measurements is likely to increase the complexity of games played in already complex political scenarios of democratic societies.
Yet it seems like the only possibility to be able to genuinely mirror Px’sutility.