Political Bargaining

Theory, Practice and Process

Gideon Doron, Itai Sened

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761952510, 9780761952503
• eBook ISBN: 9781446234310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book brings an exciting and innovative new approach to the study of politics today. It introduces political bargaining, a process at the heart of all political and economic exchanges in contemporary society and the very essence of politics itself, to provide a new framework and fresh insights to modern political science.

The authors trace the prevalence of bargaining processes in politics from the abstract level of individual human interaction and the `state of nature? to the more concrete political or institutionalized level.

They introduce students to theory -- the basic models of game theory, rational choice theory and positivist approaches; practice -- the practical manifestations of political bargaining in everyday national and international political life; and process -- its setting, the interests of the players involved, the conditions and properties that affect their calculations and, consequently, their ability to obtain desired outcomes.

Political Bargaining provides students with the basic tools for learning about and participating in politics today by richly illustrating how the authoritative allocation of scarce resources is arrived at through a complex bargaining process between competing interests in society. It will be essential reading for student and lecturer alike across political science and the social sciences more widely.

1 A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Political Bargaining

1.1 Introduction

The introductory chapter presented the theoretical context in which the phenomenon of political bargaining should be understood. It defined the phenomenon and explained how it evolved and its prevalence in our lives. Finally, it outlined several factors that are always present in the process of political bargaining. In this book we look at the various levels of political bargaining. To follow our argument, the reader needs to be familiar with some basic conceptual tools used in our theoretical analysis.

The theoretical approach we adopt is referred to as rational choice theory. This means that we adhere to two basic premises: methodological individualism and purposeful action. The first premise implies that political outcomes result from actions taken by rational individual agents in society. The second premise postulates that these rational agents have goals that they try to achieve within the framework of the physical environment in which they operate and in the context of their expectations of other agents.

The purpose of this book is to explain how strategic choices made by individual rational actors yield, through complex bargaining processes, the political outcomes that define the social orders in which we live.

It is appropriate to evaluate the merits of political outcomes in normative terms. Here, however, we are mainly concerned with a positive theory of the bargaining process through which social order emerges and evolves. We provide explanations for processes and outcomes, with little, if any, attempt to evaluate their ethical merits and demerits. Our purpose is to provide tools for understanding, not tools for normative evaluation. Some judge this approach as normatively objectionable because it restricts itself to the study of the rational aspect of human behavior as a foundation for explaining political outcomes. We find this objection out of place. If we are able to explain political phenomena we contribute to the science of human behavior. We have our normative values like everyone else, but we are not students of ethics, we are students of politics. We are not ignorant of or oblivious to normative evaluations. We simply leave it to others to study ethics while recognizing that the tools we use allow us to study only the positive side of human interactions in the political sphere.

1.2 The ‘Hard Core’ of Rational Choice Theory

In his Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978), Lakatos explains that science advances through the evolution of research programs (p. 47–8):

I have discussed the problem of objective appraisal of scientific growth in terms of progressive and degenerating problem shifts in series of scientific theories. The most important such series in the growth of science is characterized by a certain continuity which connects their members. This continuity evolves from a genuine research programme adumbrated at the start.

All scientific research programmes may be characterized by their ‘hard core.’ The negative heuristic of the programme forbids us to direct the modus tollens at this ‘hard core.’ Instead, we must use our ingenuity to articulate or even invent ‘auxiliary hypotheses,’ which form a protective belt around this core, and we must redirect the modus tollens to these.

The hard core of a research program includes basic epistemological assumptions, methodological imperatives and definitions of what should be the focus of research. In this chapter we define the hard core of the rational choice research program. The following chapters survey a series of exemplary achievements that are part of the growing protective belt of this dominant research program within contemporary social sciences.

The protective belt of a research program is made up of its cumulative achievements. The greater the achievements are, the stronger the belt that protects the hard core of the program. A research program degenerates when its protective belt whither under attack, but the hard core never stands ‘direct trial,’ since the core consists of axioms, premises or assumptions that need not stand the test of either external verification or falsification. The program collapses only when its protective belt is so thin that it can no longer withstand systematic, scientific criticism.

Basic Assumptions

We now turn to a brief discussion of the hard core that defines the rational choice theory research program to which we adhere. Rational choice theory is based on two central assumptions: Methodological individualism and purposeful action.

1. Methodological individualism: Social outcomes result from actions taken by rational, individual social agents.

This assumption states that strategic choices made by individual players, as to how to get the most out of every situation in which they are involved as agents in society, ultimately determine the political outcomes. This assumption is straightforward and requires no further discussion, except perhaps to emphasize that the term ‘social agent’ pertains to theoretical units of analysis and not necessarily to private people. ‘Individuals’ are singular units with well-defined, coherent preferences and action sets that try to choose, in every given situation, an action or a strategy from their action or strategy set, to obtain the outcome that ranks highest on their preference order. Using this methodology to analyze social situations, we implicitly utilize the as if principle (Friedman, 1953). That is to say that we may move to various levels of social aggregation and analyze different organizations as if they possessed individual preferences and strategy sets, even though we know that they do not, and cannot, share such properties.

2. Purposeful action: Individual agents are rational in the sense that they have goals which, given the physical environment within which they operate and their expectations of other agents, they purposefully seek to fulfill.

Purposeful action requires further clarification because it lies at the heart of the rationality assumption on which this entire research program is founded. The assumption can be broken down into two distinct parts. First, agents are postulated to have well-defined goals. Second, agents are assumed to do whatever they can to achieve these goals, given their physical environment and expectations of other agents. These two parts are now described in further detail.

(2.1) Rational preferences: every agent understands what s/he wants to achieve. In more technical terms, we assume that every agent can order all possible outcomes in a binary ranking relation called a weak order.

To assume that an agent can order outcomes in a weak order, denoted by ‘R’, implies that three conditions are met: completeness, transitivity and reflexivity.

(2.1.1) Completeness: ∀ i ∈ N, ∀ a,b∈O, bR_ia or aR_ib

Read: for every (∀) agent i, who is a member (∈) of the group of relevant agents N, and for any two possible outcomes a,b of the set of all possible outcomes O, either b is at least as good for i as a (bR_ia), or a is at least as good_for i as b (aR_ib). This means that any agent can order any two outcomes and identify which of the two s/he weakly prefers. If bR_ia and aR_ib then bI_ia, denotes that agent i is indifferent between a and b. If bR_ia but not aR_ib, bP_ia denotes that agent i strictly prefers b to a.

(2.1.2) Transitivity: ∀ i ∈ N, ∀ a,b,c∀O, if aR_ib and bR_ic then aR_ic.

Read: an agent who weakly prefers a to b and b to c, weakly prefers a to c.

This condition is the most fundamental assumption of rational choice theory. It assumes that agents are logical in their preferences in the sense that beyond their ability to order any pair of possible outcomes (completeness), they can order the entire set of outcomes transitively. We can appreciate how fundamental this assumption is by contemplating its failure. Preference orders that fail to meet the transitivity requirement are called cyclical.¹ Such preference orders can hardly serve anyone in making rational choices between outcomes. If aP_ib and bP_ic, but cP_ia, we get a cyclical preference order aP_ibP_icP_ia. But if aP_ibP_icP_ia, it is not clear how agent i may make a rational choice among a, b, and c. S/he would not choose a since s/he prefers c to a. S/he would not choose c since s/he prefers b to c and s/he would not choose b because s/he prefers a to b.

In the next chapter we discuss one of the most important achievements in the field of social choice theory known as ‘Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem’ (Arrow, 1951). Assuming that rational agents can order all possible outcomes in weak orders and some basic restrictions on social choice mechanisms, Arrow proved that there exists no social choice mechanism that can aggregate any preference profile of rational individuals into a social preference weak order. Riker (1982: 136) concluded a discussion of this result noting that ‘the unavoidable inference is … that so long as a society preserves democratic institutions, its members can expect that some of their social choices be unordered or inconsistent. And when this is true, no meaningful choices can be made.’ The inherent difficulty in aggregating individual preferences into social choices does not mean that complete arbitrariness guides social decisions. It means that s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Commonly Used Symbols
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Conceptual Framework for the Study of Political Bargaining
• Chapter 2: The Social Problem
• Chapter 3: A Bargained Social Contract
• Chapter 4: Special Interests and Political Entrepreneurs
• Chapter 5: Electoral and Post Electoral Bargaining in Parliamentary Systems
• Chapter 6: Post Electoral Bargaining in Presidential Systems
• Chapter 7: Bargaining at the International Arena
• Conclusion
• References
• Index