Rational Legitimacy: A Theory of Political Support 9781400870905

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The General Framework of Constitutional Choice: An Axiom, Terms, and Basic Notation
2 Wholly Interchangeable Society
3 Factionally Divided Society
4 Segmented Society
5 Mixed Social Systems and the Effects of Social Change
Conclusion. Origins of Modern Patterns of Political Cleavage and Coalition
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

RATIONAL LEGITIMACY

Rational Legitimacy A Theory of Political Support Ronald Rogowski PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Copyright © 1974 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press Princeton and London All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by the Louis A. Robb fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotype Times Roman Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

For Kay

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

began as the first half of my Ph.D. thesis at Princeton University. In exploring what then seemed a rather lonely field, I received stimulation and encouragement from a number of people: Harold Sprout, Harry Eckstein, Oran Young, Norm Frohlich, Joe Oppenheimer, Ed Morse, Ted Gurr, Stanley Kelley, and Dennis Thompson. Eckstein and Thompson, together with Walter Murphy, served as readers of the thesis and commented on it in detail. They carried friendship to considerable lengths by going over a second draft with the same care; Oran Young, Jeff Bergner, and Pat Dobel did me the same service. Bob Butterworth helped me in discussion, and Arthur Engel commented on a draft of Chapter Five. At a later stage, Peter Ordeshook and Aristide Zolberg gave fresh and helpful criticisms. For whatever errors remain after all this assistance, I am not only responsible but, I suppose, culpable. I was assisted in the early stages of my research by summer support from the Center of International Studies at Princeton, and Princeton's fund for faculty research in the humanities and social sciences has granted smaller subventions for research assistance, travel, and typing. The most important help, however, was a year's leave spent at Harvard University's Center for West European Studies, which was then directed by Stanley Hoffmann and Guido Goldman. The facilities and the fellowship there made working enjoyable; and if people were generally baffled about what I was working on, they were at least polite enough not to say so. Joe Joffe,

THIS BOOK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lynn Mytelka, Lois Wasserspring, Linda Miller, Russell Hardin, Suzanne Berger, and Charles Maier gave of their criticisms, their encouragement, and their friendship during that year. The final drafts were typed with great accuracy and patience by Mildred Kalmus; the illustrations were prepared by Charlotte Carlson; and Miriam Brokaw edited the final copy with care and forebearance. !Catherine Alice Bertram agreed, in the midst of this chaos, to become my wife. She has not, praise God, researched, typed, or criticized this book. She has kept for us a joint life independent of both our fields of work. For that, and for much else, I owe her more than I can say. R. R.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION

ONE The General Framework of Constitutional Choice: An Axiom, Terms, and Basic Notation TWO Wholly Interchangeable Society THREE Factionally Divided Society FOUR Segmented Society FIVE Mixed Social Systems and the Effects of Social Change CONCLUSION. Origins of Modern Patterns of Political Cleavage and Coalition WORKS CITED INDEX

VU 3

35 55 77 143 198

264 287

RATIONAL LEGITIMACY

INTRODUCTION

is a theoretical essay on a central question of political science: how people choose to accept or not to accept particular governments. It answers that question with two main theses: first, that people make political decisions, including even decisions about support for government, rationally, or at least act as if they did;1 and, second, that the ethnic and occupational divisions of any society are the principal information on which its members would have to base a rational choice among forms of government. The theory as a whole can be supported or refuted only by its success, or lack of it, in accounting for the variety of people's preferences among political systems. But the first of the two main theses, that of rational behavior in politics, can be attacked even before such a test on two grounds that are all but independent of evidence: first, the ground of convention—that the more familiar theories such as political culture, political socialization, or political deprivation are more satisfactory or at least show "better promise"; and, second, the ground of alleged obviousness—that by the standard of logic or of readily available evidence the thesis of rational political behavior is absurd on its face. These two attacks must be dealt with at the outset of the discussion. This I shall try to do by providing answers to two questions: why should one reject the conventional approaches to the analysis of political support; and how can one overWHAT FOLLOWS

1 This is an important reservation. See the fuller discussion at pp. 30-32 of this chapter.

3

INTRODUCTION

come what seem to be obvious and fatal objections to the model of rational choice? THE CONVENTIONAL THEORIES

Most present-day theories of political support can be placed in one of two main streams. One stream originates in sociology and concentrates on values and their inculcation (political culture and political socialization, respectively); the other derives from the Eastonian concept of the political system, and may be called "deprivation" theory. Despite some ambitious attempts to synthesize the two currents,2 they remain conceptually quite distinct, and I shall try to treat them separately here. Political Culture and Political Socialization Today's cultural and sociological approach to the study of political support can doubtless be traced back to the nineteenth century and the reaction of some European intellectuals to the alleged excesses of the French Revolution.3 But the entry of the approach into conventional American political science can be dated from two events: the publication in 1951 by Parsons, Shils, and their associates of the monumental Toward a General Theory of Action; and the appearance in 1956 of Gabriel Almond's paper on "Comparative Political Systems," which derived explicitly from the work of Parsons and Shils.4 Specialized study of the acquisition of 2 See especially Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1966). 3 See Leon Bramson, The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), esp. pp. 12-16. 4 Talcott Parsons, Edward A. Shils (eds.), et al., Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951); Almond, "Comparative Political Systems," Journal of Politics 18 (1956): 391. It is of course possible, as Brian Barry has argued (Sociologists, Economists and Democracy [London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1970], p. 76), that the formative influence can be ascribed

4

INTRODUCTION

political culture can similarly be dated from Herbert Hyman's seminal essay Political Socialization (1959).5 Even the original exponents of the approach disagreed on many aspects of nomenclature and analytical method, and no greater consensus has emerged in the later works of such adherents as Lucian Pye, Sidney Verba, Harry Eckstein, and Almond himself.6 But if one were challenged to state the fundamental propositions of the approach—those which underlie and unite this whole literature—something like the following would probably emerge: 1. Political actions, like all actions in the proper sense, can be analyzed in terms of three aspects: cognitions (knowledge), cathect or affect (immediate likes and dislikes), and evaluation (assessment of alternatives "in the light of their ramified consequences" for the actor's basic norms and values).7 2. Of all the elements of action (including political action), the norms and values (Parsons and Shils: "valueorientations") used in evaluation are the most fundamental, in the sense: (a) that they are the most deeply internalized and durable; (b) that they are most important for predicting rather to Parsons' much earlier book, The Structure of Social Action (1937). Yet it is the later work that Almond and most later students of political culture cite. s 2nd ed., New York: The Free Press, 1969. 6 Pye, Politics, Personality, and Nation-Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Pye and Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Eckstein, A Theory of Stable Democracy (Princeton: Center of Internationa] Studies, 1961), and Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics. 7 Parsons, Shils, et al., General Theory, pp. 10-11; Almond, "Comparative Political Systems," p. 396; Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 15; Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, p. 50.

5

INTRODUCTION

and explaining action; and (c) that the sharing of them "is vital to a stable social system."8 3. For any recognized type of political system (e.g., traditional, authoritarian, democratic) there is a unique set of norms, values, and other orientations that is "congruent" with that type; and congruence of political culture and political system is a necessary condition for political support.9 4. Norms and values are principally inculcated during childhood and adolescence; thereafter they can be changed only with difficulty.10 5. It is therefore clear that the most promising avenue for the prediction and explanation of political support is the study of pre-adult political socialization, both manifest and latent.11 This seems to me a fair, if perhaps not a complete, statement of the basic tenets of the approach. Against them the following points can be made: 1. There is good evidence that shared norms and values are not a necessary condition for political support. The point that shared values are not necessary for political stability has been made by Brian Barry with clarity and vigor.12 His 8 Concluding quotation from Parsons, Shils, et al., General Theory, p. 21; cf. p. 59n. and p. 227. 9 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, pp. 21-23. This understanding of "congruence," however, is not to be confused with Eckstein's usage of the term, which is quite different: see "A Theory of Stable Democracy," reprinted as Appendix B of Division and Cohesion. 10 Parsons, Shils, et al., General Theory, pp. 17-18; Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, pp. 66-68; Hyman, Political Socialization, p. 10. 11 Parsons, Shils, et al., General Theory, p. 227. Almond and Powell, Comparative Politics, p. 65, emphasize also the primacy of pre-adult socialization but add more strongly than most the reservation that socialization continues in adult life through such agencies as peer-groups, the mass media, and even experiences of frustrated expectations—surely a significant broadening of the concept, and one that threatens to reduce it to meaninglessness. See also Eckstein, "A Theory of Stable Democracy," as reprinted in Division and Cohesion, p. 237. 12 Economists, Sociologists and Democracy, chap. 4, esp. pp. 86-87.

6

INTRODUCTION

examples include the repressive regimes of South Africa and Eastern Europe. Still others, however, appear to enjoy broad popular acceptance without any perceptible commonality of culture or of values: what Lijphart has called the "consociational democracy" of the Netherlands, the anciently multicultural republic of Switzerland, and the notoriously multiethnic but famously durable state of Lebanon.13 It is possible, of course, to assert against all appearances that the citizens of polities such as these do somehow share important values; but this only demonstrates another difficulty in the approach, one that I shall take up in detail a few paragraphs on. 2. Although norms and values may well be the most deeply internalized and durable of all orientations, they do not seem to be durable enough to tell us much about the limits of political support. An example will make the problem clearer. Germany in the late 1930's was possessed of a regime whose dominance seemed secure, whose popular support (despite a few pockets of opposition) bordered on the fanatical, and whose "output-effectiveness," as modern theorists would put it, was generally conceded to be high: disinterested and even hostile observers confirmed the economic successes and the generally high levels of domestic satisfaction.14 The conventional interpretation of these facts, which admittedly grew in acceptance during and immediately after the ensuing war, was that Hitler's regime, despite some notable changes, merely embodied the essence of the old Prussian spirit. The Weimar democracy had been little more than an aberrant wave on an authoritarian sea, doomed by its uncongeniality to fundamental political orientations. The Ger13

Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), and "Consociational Democracy," World Politics 21 (1968): 207. For further discussion of each of these three cases, see below, chap. 3. 14 Background of War, by the editors of Fortune magazine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), ch. 3; and William L. Shirer, BeWm Diary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), esp. pp. 586-587.

7

INTRODUCTION

mans, everyone seemed convinced, were a culture of authoritarians if there had ever been one.15 It followed that there was hope for reform only of those Germans still young enough to be malleable—probably those under twenty-one years of age—and even this hope was slight, given the persistence of traditional German family structures.16 In 1972 the West German Federal Republic was nearing a quarter-century of existence as a stable, reasonably libertarian and democratic state. Its anti-democratic parties had consistently failed to gain over ten percent of the national vote, while its democratic ones had successfully executed one peaceful transfer of power at the national level, and many more at the state and local levels. The outcome seemed to fit ill with the old prognosis. Adherents of conventional theory could explain the contrast most easily by invoking the slender hope that the original analysis allowed: education, it could be argued, was successfully reformed; younger generations of Germans were successfully socialized into democratic values; and, while the older, authoritarian Germans slowly died off, this new and different group became the stable support of the Second Republic. As Willy Brandt has often reminded audiences, a majority of today's West Germans were not even alive in 1945. Unfortunately the available data do not provide much support for this interpretation. Almond and Verba, to be sure, found some evidence that participation in family and school affairs (or at least the recollection of it) was livelier among younger respondents—in Germany as in all other 15

See for example S. D. Stirk, The Prussian Spirit: A Survey of German Literature and Politics, 1914-1940 (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1941); Richard M. Brickner, Is Germany Incurable? (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1943); and Fritz Nova, The National Socialist Fiihrerprinzip and its Background in German Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1943). 16 See Bertram Schaffner, Father Land: A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), esp. p. 91.

8

INTRODUCTION

countries studied.17 But even if these reminiscences are right, the evidence does not suggest that changes in socialization have led to changes of political values. A 1958 survey of West Germans asked, first, whether they thought a parliament was really necessary for the country; and, second (a standard "democracy-vs.-dictatorship" question in German surveys), whether it was better that "several people have a say" in things, even at the cost of some delay, or whether "the whole power of government" should be given to one man. On neither question did the age of the respondents make any difference worth mentioning: of the 16-to-29-year-olds, 71 percent thought a parliament necessary; of the 30-to-44-yearolds, 72 percent; of the 45-to-59-year-olds, 71 percent; of those over 60, 68 percent. Similarly, the majorities by which the respondents thought it better that "several people have a say" varied among the same age-groups only as follows (again, youngest to oldest): 62, 62, 61, and 58 percent.18 This can hardly be conclusive; but surely if 1945 had marked a real caesura in German primary education we should find something more substantial on questions as basic as these. Of the 16-to-29-year-olds, over a quarter (those aged 16 through 19 in 1958) would never have set foot in a Nazi-controlled school, and a considerable majority (all those aged 16 through 23) would have spent more years in nonNazi than in Nazi primary schools (the primary-school leaving age being 14). It may be, of course, that truly generational differences can be found (and not ones that are contaminated, for example, by class, such as the contrasts between university students and the general population). It might be argued, moreover, that the differences, if any, that emerge somehow reflect conflict on values more "basic" than the ones I have indicated. That would only lead us to the question of what " Civic Culture, p. 339. Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann, eds., Jahrbuch der offentlichen Meinung, 1958-1964 (Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag fur Demoskopie, 1965), pp. 261, 255. 18

9

INTRODUCTION

values really are the most fundamental: this question, I think, has never been resolved in the conventional theory of political culture, and I shall want to discuss it separately later. But let us assume what the evidence now available leads us to guess: that no very convincing inter-generational differences are to be found. How, if at all, could such a finding be reconciled with the theory of political culture; and what implications would the reconciliation have for the rest of the theory? Recall the dilemma: what was once agreed, on good evidence, to be a profoundly authoritarian political culture has now shown itself capable of sustaining high support for democracy for over a generation. If the concept of political culture is to have any explanatory value at all, it must follow that the political culture has changed. Yet (so we are supposing, on a preliminary inspection of the evidence) no purely generational differences can be found among the Germans: the political culture of the young does not differ markedly from the political culture of the old. Surely only one conclusion will fit the "framework" of political culture; and that is that all the Germans must have undergone a change in political values. Not just primary education must have been changed (else stronger generational differences would appear), but a whole population must somehow have been re-educated, re-socialized into values "congruent" with democratic rule. No other conclusion seems to be congruent with our facts in this case; and Almond and Powell have argued that such resocialization can occur. As they put it, "the socialization process goes on continuously throughout the life of the individual. . . . Certain events and experiences may leave their mark on a whole society. A great war or a depression can constitute a severe political trauma for millions of individuals who may be involved."19 There is, moreover, some support in German survey materials for the view that a secular trans19

Comparative Politics, p. 65.

10

INTRODUCTION

formation has occurred.20 But if whole societies can be changed so drastically, the whole problem becomes much trickier. The theorist must specify not merely that originally acquired values are durable; he must be able to say how durable: under what conditions, and to what extent, can values change? This, to my knowledge, no theorist of the conventional school has yet done save in a speculative and imprecise way.21 Almond and Powell content themselves with the assertion that "no citizen fully overcomes the effects of his latent primary socialization."22 It is hard to imagine how anyone could deny this, but it does not tell us very much; nor is it easy to imagine the kind of research or measurement that could tell us more. As "durable" has come, in the face of evidence, to mean "not completely changeable," much of the power has gone out of the theory of political culture, and it is hard to see how it could be put back. 3. There is no agreement among the theorists on which values are "basic"—in the senses of durable and causative— for political evaluation and action; there is therefore no agreement on how to measure such values; and there is nothing in the approach that makes agreement on either issue likely. Almond and Verba chose to examine cognitions, affect, and evaluations of citizens with regard to four classes of objects: the political system in general, its input structures, 20

The percentage of respondents who held that "several people should have a say" rose slightly between 1956 and 1967, from 56 to 61; and the support for a one-party system declined steadily, from 22 percent in 1951 to 18 percent in 1954 and 11 percent in 1956, where it seems to have remained since. Elisabeth Noelle and Erich Peter Neumann, eds., Jahrbuch der offentlichen Meinung, 1965-1967 (Allensbach and Bonn: Verlag fur Demoskopie, 1967), p. 152; idem, Jahrbuch der offentlichen Meinung, 1957 (Allensbach am Bodensee: Verlag fur Demoskopie, 1957), p. 259; and idem, Jahrbuch 1958-1964, p. 428. 21 See for example Sidney Verba, "Comparative Political Culture," in Pye and Verba, Political Culture and Political Development, p. 512. 22 Comparative Politics, p. 71.

11

INTRODUCTION

its output structures, and the citizen himself as a member of the system. Eckstein argued that it was cognitions and values about authority in general—private authority as well as public—that counted. Easton and Dennis, in their study of childhood socialization, looked at the development of attitudes that provide or deny support to the structure of political authority, including particularly cognitions of, and affect toward, the most salient political roles.23 Even if agreement could be reached on the question of which values are basic—and of this there is as yet no promise—differences of tactics (survey methods, for example, against historical or observational techniques), of operationalization (which questions or techniques to use), and of scaling (what scale to use, and what differences on it to count as important) would remain. These are hardly minor problems. On their solution depends the whole possibility of testing essential propositions of the conventional theory, not least that which holds a certain "congruence" between political culture and political system to be a necessary condition for support.24 So long as there is no agreement about the kind and degree of "congruence" necessary, and about how to ascertain them, waffling will always be possible: maybe Germany has undergone change in the really "basic" values (which, however, were not specified before the survey was undertaken); maybe observation is sufficient to confirm that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have basic consensus, despite the existence of the same multi-party systems that are taken, in France or Italy, as proof of "fragmented" political cultures; and maybe the many studies that showed how successfully American 23 Almond and Verba, Civic Culture, p. 15; Eckstein, "A Theory," as reprinted in Division and Cohesion, pp. 233-234; David Easton and Jack Dennis, with the assistance of Sylvia Easton, Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969), chap. 5. 24 The point about measurement is made by Barry in his criticisms of Almond and Verba and of Eckstein: Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, pp. 50, 61-62.

12

INTRODUCTION

children were being socialized were merely asking the wrong questions. But we cannot know, and cannot keep from repeating the errors of the past, without some kind of agreement on these problems of procedure. In a fundamental work on the philosophy of science, Henry Margenau distinguished between epistemic and constitutive definitions: an epistemic definition is purely operational—it tells us at least one clear way of measuring something, allegedly the theoretical variable; the constitutive definition relates the variable to other parts of the theory in such a way as to establish its conceptual "essence," and thereby to decide the merits of various epistemic definitions. Temperature is an example: there are many ways of measuring it, and these will not always agree; this occasioned great difficulty and greater discussion until physical theory gained a clear view—a constitutive definition—of what temperature must mean in terms of a more general framework, namely the intensity of molecular movement. With this, existing measures could be reconciled and more precise ones devised: a common yardstick for all the measures was now available.25 Seen in this light, our problem is that the definitions of values and other orientations that have been advanced are at best epistemic; they cannot be constitutive because the theory itself does not give us a good enough idea of what values are fundamental, and of how these values would connect with political action. There is a fundamental failing in the theory that makes definitions uncertain; uncertain definitions make for uncertainty about strategies and measures; and so long as measures remain uncertain, convincing tests of the theory are impossible. The problem lies with the theory. It may be possible to remedy it; but, again, it is hard to see how. 4. There is no good evidence to support the view that preadult socialization determines later political action, or indeed 25

The Nature of Physical Reality (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1950), chap. 12.

13

INTRODUCTION

that "learned" behavior can be distinguished from other behavior. This is at least suggested by what was said under point 2 about the durability, or lack of it, of political values. But it is instructive to add to that argument the evidence of recent work in political socialization. The original position of those who advocated the study of political socialization was quite strong. Hyman, in his pioneering essay, described political behavior as "patently" "learned behavior" and argued that "humans must learn their political behavior early and well and persist in it. Otherwise there would be no regularity—perhaps even chaos."26 But Easton and Dennis, writing ten years later, were considerably more cautious. They asserted only that it was "a plausible working assumption" "that what is learned early is likely to be more influential than what is learned later"; and they warned explicitly that "Nowhere has any solid evidence been adduced about the longitudinal impact of early socialization."27 But "what is learned later" may become indistinguishable from what is done later by way of simple—perhaps even "rational"—adaptation. Easton and Dennis make this confusion apparent in their discussion of the development of respect for police. They discover that respect seems to decline steadily in America throughout childhood; and, supplementing this finding with data from surveys in the U.S. and Great Britain that show respect for police increases generally after about age 25, they posit that a "trough" of respect is likely reached during late adolescence and early adulthood.28 But is this "trough" specific to America or to the present generation? Does it reflect changed socialization, or changed experiences? Easton and Dennis explain the findings this way: "It probably parallels the general decline in the growing child's proclivity for idealizing persons. . . . But in addition, 26

Political Socialization, pp. 9-10; emphasis in original. 27 Children, p. 75. 2S Ibid., chap. 11, esp. p. 234; and pp. 300-303.

14

INTRODUCTION

the child's initial feelings [of respect] are probably deflected by specific kinds of experiences and values associated with special periods in the immediately succeeding phases of his life [e.g., teen-age run-ins with police]. . . . "As the individual moves out of these early stages of his life into later adulthood, however, some of his positive sentiments . . . revive, either because they had continued in latent form, waiting to surface again, or because they are reinvigorated through new experiences. Perhaps both influences are at work."29 Perhaps. But in that admission, and in the data that occasion it, there is certainly also a problem for the "working assumption" that childhood socialization is the primary influence on later political behavior. After all, the changes that appear to occur after childhood are rather drastic ones: in the American national survey of 1965 cited by Easton and Dennis (Figure A) there is a steady increase in respect for police from age 21-25 (53 percent) to age 56-60 (84 percent); but then a somewhat irregular decline sets in, until those over 76 show no more respect than the 41-45-yearolds. Worse, an entirely different "trough" emerges in a local study that they examine: in Los Angeles in 1953, respect seemed to decline (or certainly not to rise) from age 15 to age 44; only after 45 did respect begin to rise. The "trough," then, was more persistent in Los Angeles: does this mean that socialization is different there, or merely that the "reinvigorating" later experiences are slower in coming?30 It seems better to admit, as Easton and Dennis do, that findings of this kind challenge the older view that political values were probably "learned early and well" and "persisted in" in any non-chaotic society. But to admit that "specific kinds of experiences" can cause children's respect for police to decline from 27 percent in grade four to 10 percent in grade eight, or that they can be responsible for a 29 Ibid., pp. 303-304. so Ibid., p. 301.

15

INTRODUCTION

range of 31 percentage points in the sentiments of adult Americans, is to admit a very great deal—so much, indeed, as to leave original socialization very little influence.31 But there is a deeper problem. If the experiences of childhood and of later life (run-ins with police in the teens, possibly favorable experiences in one's 20's or 30's) can be FIGURE A Percent Responding that They Have "a great deal" of Respect for the Police * W = 285

53

298

343

367

426

329

365

270

61

72

70

77

78

84

264

168

70

75

68

Age

'Question-. "How much respect do you have for the police in your area—a great deal, some, or hardly any?" Source.· A.I.P.O. Survey no. 0709 (March, 1965), Question O i l .

categorized as a kind of "learning"—and obviously at least the former must be so categorized, if decline in respect sets in as early as grade four or five—then how can socialization be distinguished from adaptation? If a ten-year-old who previ31 The proportion of children who said of the policeman, "I like him more than anyone," or "I like him more than most" is 27 percent in grade four and 10 percent in grade eight. Ibid., p. 234.

16

INTRODUCTION

ously thought highly of the police learns that they have treated a thirteen-year-old in his school brutally and unjustly, and if he decides as a result that they are "pigs," has he been re-socialized or has he just changed his mind? If the person whose opinion is altered is 30 years old instead of 10, will the answer be different? Once it is admitted that values can change, it is hardly possible to stop even at the point at which Almond and Powell have arrived: that almost every known source of experience or influence—the mass media, the fulfillment or frustration of expectations, participation in a party or a pressure group—is a medium of socialization. Theory is reduced by such broadening to description, and once-powerful basic propositions are discarded for the simple maxim that nothing may safely be neglected. But that maxim can be asserted without benefit of theory, and it is therefore hard to see what so eviscerated a theory of socialization adds to our understanding. Theories of Deprivation By theories of deprivation I mean theories that admit that learned behavior can be altered, and that try to specify the mechanisms by which this alteration occurs. More specifically, theories of deprivation often attempt to state how enculturated loyalties can be eroded by perceptions of deprivation, and how deprivation comes to be perceived. The contrast that such theories offer to those of the more extreme advocates of political socialization will be apparent; but it will also be seen that a theory of deprivation, if otherwise successful, could meet at least some of the objections previously raised against theories of political culture. If it were possible to state with any precision how learned behavior is altered, then the problems of durability of values and of the relative importance of pre-adult socialization would largely disappear. Hence these theories are worth considering in some detail. 17

INTRODUCTION

One of the earliest manifestations of deprivation theory in political science, and the one probably still the most influential, was advanced by David Easton in 1957 and developed in extended form in two subsequent books.32 His hypotheses were advanced almost incidentally as part of a far more general systemic analysis of politics, and this general framework must be briefly recapitulated here if the specific discussion is to make any sense.33 Easton views the political system as the set of all activities and relationships in a given society having to do with the authoritative allocation of values in that society. This system interacts with the rest of the society, and with elements outside the society, in at least three analytically important ways: the system receives from the "environment" the "inputs" of supports and demands; it delivers back to the environment as "outputs" decisions about the demands, decisions that always amount to authoritative allocations of values. These outputs then "feed back" to create new supports and demands. We are naturally most concerned with supports, which are defined as actions or orientations that favor the system— or, more specifically, that favor its political community (i.e., the very idea of membership in the same political society), its regime (the roles, structures, and rules of the system), or its authorities (the present incumbents of its roles of leadership). Support may be either diffuse (relatively unconditional) or specific (given as a quid pro quo in a strict bar32 "An Approach to the Analysis of Political Systems," World Politics 9 (1957): 383. A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965). A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965). The view of politics as the authoritative allocation of values, and some other elements of the later systemic framework in protean form, is of course also present in Easton's earlier work, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). 33 This summary of Easton's views is gleaned from the works cited, taking the most recent version as authoritative wherever conflict exists. For the best summary, see A Systems Analysis, chap. 2.

18

INTRODUCTION

gaining relationship); only diffuse support is taken by Easton to be stable.34 Easton is convinced that diffuse support must always result in large part from political socialization, and not purely from rational adaptation.35 But he is equally persuaded that learned loyalties cannot persist in the face of long-term dissatisfaction with outputs: "Without some minimal satis­ faction of demands, the ardor of all but the most fanatical patriot is sure to cool."36 Or elsewhere: "Numerous condi­ tions contribute to the decline of support. A large part of them may be summed up under one category: output fail­ ure." 37 Problems of quantification naturally arise in determining what "minimal satisfaction" would be, and the minima of demands, as Easton has emphasized, "will vary with his­ torical moment and culture."38 But it seems to follow from the logic of the analysis that, in nearly all cases, more should be safer: if people demand a 10 percent cut in taxes, a cut of 15 percent should generate even more support. If they de­ mand a widening of the franchise, universal suffrage should make them ecstatic.39 This seems a sensible enough way of looking at the relationship between outputs and supports. People want "values," and if the "authorities" only give them enough, they will be happy. As Easton puts it: "We can expect that direct satisfaction of demands will at least gen­ erate specific support; and the longer such satisfactions are 34

"Political Systems," pp. 390-395; A Systems Analysis, chaps. ΙΟ­ Ι 3 and pp. 267-269. 35 See especially A Systems Analysis, p. 280; see also "Political Systems," pp. 396-400; A Framework, pp. 124-125; and A Systems Analysis, pp. 273-274. 38 "Political Systems," p. 395. " A Systems Analysis, p. 230. 38 A Framework, p. 126. 39 Easton emphasizes, of course, that responses that are seen as beside the point will not work: e.g., lowering rents when an expan­ sion of the suffrage is demanded. This he calls a "failure . . . not . . . in the quantity but in the quality of the outputs." A Systems Analysis, p. 231.

19

INTRODUCTION

felt, the more likely it is that a higher level of political good will develop. If members continuously perceive that their demands are being met on a day-to-day basis, their loyalty to all objects can naturally be expected to increase."40 Attitudes of support unfortunately do not seem to develop or to decay in quite this way in the real world. Let us consider one case of each type. When the Northern Irish civil rights movement began in 1967, it concentrated its demands on social problems such as housing and employment, deliberately avoiding the more basic issues of partition and the permanent Protestant domination of the Stormont parliament.41 Even as resistance stiffened and some protest parades were violently attacked, things went only to the point of demanding changes in the local government franchise (wealth could still buy extra votes, and lack of it could disfranchise one) and in police administration (there were accusations of insufficient protection). Under pressure from Westminster, these demands were met: equality of votes was accepted and local gerrymandering ended; housing allotments were removed from the discretion of local authorities and made subject to a fair and easily understood point system; the British Government assumed all but direct control of the police; and a Community Relations Board composed in equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics was established and given wide powers of investigation and mediation. To say that even specific support was increased by these measures would be a considerable overstatement; to speak of a "higher level of good will" would be a mockery. As one observer pointed out: "It was, in fact, a classical example of the inadequacy of reform offered under duress. Had it come earlier it might have obviated crisis, but to those whom it was designed to placate, it clearly had come only as a 40

A Systems Analysis, p. 275. Martin Wallace, Drums and Guns: Revolution in Ulster (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1970), p. 31. Much of the subsequent summary is taken from chaps. 1, 2, 6, and 7 of this book. 41

20

INTRODUCTION

result of crisis. And so the situation continued, almost of its own momentum, to deteriorate. . . ."42 This has been true of each of the succeeding "outputs" as well: no matter how great the values the authorities allocated to the Catholic minority, and no matter how much these values were the precise ones that had been demanded by that minority, the Catholics grew no more reconciled to the existing authorities. Even the long-demanded suspension of the Stormont government served to create only a momentary lull. It should be emphasized that this point is independent of the question of how to reconcile Catholic demands with Protestant resistance. The Protestants have indeed been enraged by every concession to the Catholics, and in that there is nothing surprising; but, far more curious, the Catholics have not been mollified by even the most far-reaching concessions: with every victory, they have only escalated their demands, until now only a "32-county Republic" seems to have any prospect of satisfying them.43 Social scientists would be ill-advised to follow the analysis of British administrators, who in their frustration are doubtless tempted to ascribe this behavior to bottomless greed and ingratitude; but there is certainly little in the tragic story that would serve to confirm Easton's hypothesis. If diffuse support cannot always be built by the satisfaction of overt demands, neither will it always be destroyed even by severe value-deprivations. Sometimes, to be sure, authorities have pursued policies that severely deprived their people and apparently in consequence have seen their regimes overthrown: the disastrous wars of the two Napoleons, of the last Czars of Russia, and of the German Kaiser may serve as examples. Yet other rulers have incurred disasters of similar 12

F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 751. 43 Thus the difficulty for Eastonian theory cannot be met simply by reference to his arguments about social cleavages, which say in essence that if people are divided enough it will be impossible to keep everyone happy. See A Systems Analysis, pp. 240-242.

21

INTRODUCTION

proportions and survived: the English monarchy, which the great Napoleon at first defeated at every turn; the Stalinist dictatorship, whose purges and blunders allowed Hitler to wreak untold suffering; the Prussian State, which survived Jena to reform and renew itself. Perhaps these are special cases of deprivation attributable more to the foreign conqueror than to the failings of one's own government. But even where the deprivations are unmistakably the work of native authorities, the consequences are not always the same: the burden borne by French peasants under Louis XVI can hardly have been greater than that which the Chinese leadership imposed on their people in the Great Leap Forward; yet it is not clear that the latter led even to a decline in diffuse support, let alone to revolutionary acts. It could of course be argued that this reasoning misunderstands the concept of "value," and that in the cases where diffuse support continued the citizens must have valued the distant goal (victory or modernization) more, and their immediate sufferings less. But to say this is to say—as with the uncertainty about the relative importance of various "values" in political culture—both everything and nothing: if what seems to any normal human being to be severe deprivation (e.g., the death of a large part of a society's population, or the loss of much of its wealth) can be dismissed as no deprivation at all within the cultural context, then it is hard to imagine how the hypothesis could ever be disconfirmed. Instead of accepting such a tautology, a number of adherents of the theory of deprivation have attempted to modify the simple Eastonian model of the relation between system outputs and support. They have reached into history, into psychology, and into sociology for more elaborate and possibly more accurate theories.44 James Davies has advanced 44

For a useful summary and criticism of some of these theories, see H. L. Nieburg, Political Violence: The Behavioral Process (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969), chap. 2.

22

INTRODUCTION

the by now well-known J-curve hypothesis, which holds that rebellion is most likely when a long period of increasing satisfactions is interrupted by a sharp decline;45 and Ted Gurr has attempted to specify both fixed categories of values (e.g., welfare, power, and interpersonal values) and the determinants of changes in level of demand.46 Yet it seems clear, in reference to Davies' proposition, that the succession of the Coolidge prosperity by the Hoover crash in America was a classic example of a J-curve but one that did not end in rebellion, while the Irish Rising of 1916 came not after any downturn, but in the midst of a wartime boom that had brought unparalleled prosperity and economic satisfaction.47 And whatever the empirical support (apparently considerable) for Gurr's hypotheses, they are so catholic in their choice of variables that they come rather closer to being a catalog of correlations than a coherent and explanatory theory: value-expectations, for example, are held to vary with all of the following—existing perceptions of deprivation, exposure to higher standards of living, perceived availability of values, value-gains of groups of similar socioeconomic status, discrepancy of gains in different categories of values, and the rate of past gains.48 45 James C. Davies, "The J-Curve of Rising and Declining Satisfactions as a Cause of Some Great Revolutions and a Contained Rebellion," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, June, 1969), 2: 547. 46 Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 47 ". . . in 1916 from county after county came news of booming times. . . . In Cavan, 'the farming classes are in a very prosperous condition.' In Down, 'industrial employment is very fair and wages are good.' In Tyrone 'agricultural interests were never so prosperous.' . . . In Louth they were enjoying a period of 'unexampled prosperity.' So also in Wexford, Cork, and some other counties." Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, pp. 358-359. *s Gurr, Why Men Rebel, chap. 4, hypotheses H:VE.l through H:VE.5.

23

INTRODUCTION

Just as with the conventional theories of political culture and political socialization, a powerful and unambiguous theory of political deprivation has had to be modified almost into meaninglessness by its repeated confrontations with uncomfortable facts. It may be possible, here as there, to save the theory in some elegant way no one now foresees; but in the meantime, it seems little use in either case to cling to the rotting hulk if we can find any solider support. THE THEORY OF RATIONAL CHOICE

One can of course agree with much of the preceding criticism of conventional theory without being persuaded that the theory of rational choice offers the better explanation we seek; and indeed existing theory can probably be best defended by emphasizing not its own virtues but the seemingly manifest faults of rationalist theory.49 The prejudice against the rationalist view runs deep and is supported by good reasons. I shall try to answer the most important objections in a moment; but it is important first to understand their origins. The modern science of politics, as Cassirer has emphasized,30 began with Hobbes, and the line of inquiry he opened can be traced through Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Mirabeau, and Mill down to the advent of the present century. Despite their obvious differences, all of these writers can be viewed as adherents of what I propose to call the classical rationalist theory of politics. Theorists of this school shared: first, a belief in a deductive science of politics; second, what Thomas Kuhn has called the "corpuscular" perspective of science in the Newtonian and post-Newtonian period,51 which 49

See for example Sidney Verba's reply to Lewis Lipsitz, "If, As Lipsitz Thinks, Political Science Is To Save Our Souls, God Help Us!" American Political Science Review (APSR) 62 (1968): 576. 50 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 253. 51 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 41-42.

24

INTRODUCTION

in politics meant treating individuals as if they were physical atoms, i.e. (as Cassirer wrote of Hobbes) "as abstract units without any particular quality";52 and, finally, the fundamental axiom that these "abstract units" act (or at least should act) to maximize their own welfare:53 or as Locke stated it, "no rational creature can be supposed to change his condition with an intention to be worse."54 From Rousseau and Locke onwards, the classical theory came to accept as established truth that only some form of democracy could make the chains of government legitimate to rational men; and in this form, which soon became rigid and dogmatic, the theory set the foundation for what in Kuhnian terms could be called the "normal" American science of politics in the nineteenth century, and in particular for that period's emphasis on the study of democratic governments and of constitutional legal forms.55 52

Cassirer, Enlightenment, pp. 255-256. Individual welfare can of course be identified, as it is for example in Rousseau, with the welfare of the healthy State; but the existence of this identity is argued and not assumed by classical rationalist theorists. In other words, sacrifice of apparent individual welfare to the welfare of all must be justified by showing it in fact to further a deeper individual welfare. 54 John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, §131. 55 The fundamental position of nineteenth-century "normal" science is well summarized in Woodrow Wilson's The State (1898), a work that has been described by one modern critic as "a summation of all the dominant modes of political thought of his time," when Wilson asserts that "the sanction of every rule not founded upon sheer military despotism is the consent of a thinking people." (The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1898, p. 586.) See also, however, Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, Inc., 1967), who note the late nineteenth-century "assault" upon the earlier " 'deductive' approach," which "mistook [science] to entail the logical deduction of 'laws' from a priori first principles, much in the grand tradition of Hobbes and Locke" (p. 30). It is obviously not clear just who was (or is) "mistaken" in this controversy; and the whole tempest of the period, which Somit and Tanenhaus seem to me to exaggerate in a strained attempt to draw analogies to the present, 33

25

INTRODUCTION

Given its dogmatic belief in the natural attraction of rational men to democratic rule, this science of politics could not withstand the experience of the years between the World Wars, when large and seemingly civilized societies either renounced democracy or failed to defend it. As Alexander Gerschenkron described the effect of this experience in the midst of World War II: " . . . the first World War . . . ensured defeat of the forces which had so long opposed democracy and parliamentary government. The 'secular curve' of democracy seemed to have reached its highest point. This result appeared to be 'natural' in terms of the general political philosophy of the nineteenth century, which had been wedded to the idea that the future belonged to democracy. . . . "Today the situation is very different. . . . the generations of the nineteenth century . . . knew full well that a democratic form of government might succumb to the onslaught of antidemocratic forces. . . . What it could not conceive was that democracy might commit suicide. "Until recently [the problem] might be thought of almost exclusively in terms of 'immature democracies.' But the state of far-reaching disintegration in which the outbreak of the war surprised the Third Republic in France has shown that even a long democratic history does not necessarily immunize a country against becoming a 'democracy without democrats.' " 5e At about the same time, Carl J. Friedrich was cataloguing the consequences of this disillusionment with classical theory: might as easily be seen as a dialogue within a school committed to democracy and to the primacy (if not unanimously to the adequacy) of formal-legal studies—studies that really made sense only if one accepted the classical theory and its emphasis on constitutional forms or, as Rousseau called them, "political laws." That disagreement aside, it seems clear to those authors, as it does to me, that the "deductive" approach of classical rationalism had at least the status of an important stream in nineteenth-century American political science. 56 Bread and Democracy in Germany (1943; new ed., New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), pp. 3-5.

26

INTRODUCTION

"the dragon of early nineteenth-century rationalism," he wrote, "has been slain quite a few times before; but now he is surely dead." In its place was arising a new political science, whose "metaphysics is deterministic; . . . the human being is seen as motivated largely by drives beyond his control."57 It was this new and non-rationalist political science which imported into the field the tools and assumptions of such older non-rationalist disciplines as sociology and psychology: Freud and Pareto in the 1930's and 1940's, Weber in the 1950's and 1960's. In the period following World War II, however, work resumed in another neighboring discipline that eventually would lead to the possibility of renewed interest in rationalist theory. Economists became interested once more in problems of small-group interactions, oligopoly, and social welfare— problems that had been neglected by "mainstream" economics since the early part of the century as intrinsically vague and probably impossible of solution. The groundbreaking work in this regard was John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944).58 Paul Samuelson included in his Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) a section on welfare economics, which dwelt principally on the impossibility of defining a general welfare function.59 And a major attempt at a full-scale revival of welfare questions came with William J. Baumol's Welfare Economics and the Theory of the State (1952).60 Baumol's work was new (or, by its resurrection of some of the questions of classical rationalist theory, old) in its attempt at a synthesis between the disciplines of economics and politics. Others had begun to carry specific syntheses of this kind much further, and it was these efforts which first 57

Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1941), pp. 593, 167. 58 3rd ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, paperback edition, 1967. 59 Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 00 2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

27

INTRODUCTION

achieved wide currency among political scientists: here must be mentioned the works of Kenneth Arrow (1951), Anthony Downs (1957), Duncan Black (1958), and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962).61 At the same time the study of conflict, which had been the focus of von Neumann and Morgenstern's work, generated a large (if somewhat diffuse) literature: among the main apostles to students of politics have been Thomas Schelling, Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, and Anatol Rapoport.62 While the main successes of this line of inquiry have been in the field of international politics, some attempts have now been made to extend the applications to questions of domestic conflict and coalition bargaining.63 In the decade of the 1960's, students of voting (following largely the work of Downs) began to amass considerable evidence in favor of the model of rational choice, and a polemical literature in its support began to occupy political scientists generally.64 But the claims made on behalf of the 61

Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley & Sons); Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row); Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperback). 62 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, A Galaxy Book, 1963); Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957); Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). 63 A flawed but seminal essay was William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). Among more recent examples are Robert Axelrod, Conflict of Interest: A Theory of Divergent Goals with Applications to Politics (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1970), and Sven Groennings, et al., eds., The Study of Coalition Behavior: Theoretical Perspectives and Cases from Four Continents (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 64 For an excellent summary and critique of recent work, see Michael Taylor, "Mathematical Political Theory," British Journal of Political Science 1 (1971): 339-382. A more comprehensive summary

28

INTRODUCTION

theory are usually modest, reflecting the fact that very strong objections, stemming mostly from the remembered disillusionment of the 1920's and 1930's, will still be raised against any attempt at a broader application of the kind I intend. These objections are serious and must be met. I will discuss the four that seem to me most common: three are readily answered, and I will deal with those first; the remaining objection strikes me as far more difficult.65 1. Does "rational" not mean the same thing as "logical?" is William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook, An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973). For the flavor of the more argumentative pieces, see Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy, and Iohn C. Harsanyi, "Rational-Choice Models of Political Behavior versus Functionalist and Conformist Theories," World Politics 21 (1969): 513-538, esp. pp. 513-515 and 529-534. 65 1 omit discussion here in any detail of one objection that, while common at least in private discussion, strikes me as trivial. This is the "collectivist" objection to the allegedly "individualist" bias of rationalist theory. Briefly, this objection holds that rationalist theory must necessarily concentrate on the "self-interested" aspects of human behavior, and that it therefore ignores (or cannot account for) cases of co-operative or altruistic behavior; further, it is sometimes alleged, the rationalist approach is unable to admit the possibility of a collective, or "public," interest separate from individual wills. To answer as concisely as possible: First, it has been stressed by nearly every rationalist theorist from Downs forward that "selfinterested" behavior need not be selfish: the citizen whose chief demand is for aid to starving Chinese is hardly selfish; but neither is he irrational, unless he acts in ways which he knows will not help to achieve his demand (Economic Theory of Democracy, p. 37). Second, it can be trivially shown that any species of co-operative behavior can be translated as a particular function of individual preferences: see for example Yasusuke Murakami, Logic and Social Choice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 20-25, and some of the discussion of chaps. 3 and 4 below. Finally, rationalist theory can of course admit the possibility of a collective will independent of individual wills, if only it is specified how this collective will is to be ascertained; but this is usually done only in the most nebulous terms. For a more complete discussion of this non-issue, see Riker and Ordeshook, Positive Political Theory, pp. 33-37.

29

INTRODUCTION

And is it not obvious that people do not behave logically, least of all in politics? This objection can practically be identified with Vilfredo Pareto; it is certainly powerful, and some have attributed to its influence, and to Pareto's, much of the twentieth century's abandonment of rationalist theory.66 Pareto called actions "logical" if they "logically conjoin means to ends not only from the standpoint of the subject performing them, but from the standpoint of other persons who have a more extensive knowledge."67 By this standard, he argued, a very great proportion of human actions was not "logical." Those who followed Pareto were less careful: actions that merely displeased the observer, or that revealed idiosyncratic tastes, were dismissed as "non-rational" or "irrational." If by rational decisions one means decisions of which one approves, or even merely "logical" decisions in Pareto's sense, then it is impossible to argue that people generally decide political questions rationally; but it seems more sensible to reject these definitions. Let us try instead taking rational actions to mean only those which Pareto called "subjectively logical": ones that conjoin means to ends most efficiently from the standpoint of the actor.68 2. If one takes "rational" to mean merely "rational from the standpoint of the actor," does not the assertion that people behave rationally become tautologous? Not quite: we have not said "rational in the actor's own view," but rather "rational from his standpoint." The former would imply that anything he thought rational we should have to call rational; but the definition I have actually introduced leaves us an objective criterion of rationality—namely whether the actions are the most efficient joining of means to ends in the light of 66

See S. E. Finer, "Pareto and Pluto-Democracy: The Retreat to Galapagos," APSR 62 (1968): 440-450. 07 The Mind and Society, ed. Arthur Livingston (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1935), §150, 1:77. 68 Ibid., 1:76-77. For a more formal statement of the definition of rationality, see below, p. 36.

30

INTRODUCTION

the information available to the actor. It is perfectly possible to imagine cases in which we should have to say, using this criterion, that a person had acted irrationally; in Harsanyi's homely example, it would be irrational to take a ship from New York to London if the goal were to get there within a few hours and jet planes were known to be available.69 Hence the charge of tautology, or truth by definition, cannot strictly be sustained. It must nonetheless be admitted, however, that a substantial amount of circularity is involved at the deeper level of goals, as opposed to means: utilities are defined by observed preferences of actors, and these preferences are then "explained" in terms of utility. If the theory remained at this level, it would of course be nothing but a word game; but fortunately it does not. The situation is analogous, as has often been pointed out before, to that of the natural sciences: while an "atrocious circularity" (in Margenau's phrase) lies at the heart of Newtonian mechanics, it has nonetheless been possible to build empirically testable theories around that circularity, indeed suspended from it.70 As von Neumann and Morgenstem put it, "It does not seem to us that these notions [of preference and utility] are qualitatively inferior to certain well established and indispensable notions in physics, like force, mass, charge, etc. That is, while they are in their immediate form merely definitions, they become subject to empirical control through the theories which are built upon them—and in no other way. Thus the notion of utility is raised above the status of a tautology by such economic theories as make use of it and the results of which can be compared with experience or at least with common sense."71 3. Can it seriously be alleged that the ordinary citizen—or indeed anyone—carries out the often quite complex calculations that rationalist theories (for example game theory) seem to impute to them? Probably not. Even the relatively simple 69 70 71

Harsanyi, "Rational-Choice Models," p. 515. Margenau, Nature of Physical Reality, p. 220. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, pp. 8-9.

31

INTRODUCTION

model Anthony Downs introduces to account for voters' behavior involves arithmetical gymnastics that such studies as The American Voter would lead us to suspect are somewhat beyond ordinary capacity.72 But Downs hastens to warn us against assuming that voters actually make their decisions in the way his model describes, and most economists and game theorists who have given the matter thought would probably concur: the corner grocer seldom carries out the computations by which the professor of microeconomic theory tries to predict his behavior.73 Hence the more serious question is the contrary one: Can one accept a model that does not claim to represent real processes? Let us consider one homely and possibly apocryphal example. A few years ago, an enterprising student of engineering and of baseball came to consider how an outfielder knows where to stand in order to catch a high pop fly. Logically enough, he considered this as a problem in mechanical physics, and reduced to the simplest possible package the information and calculations necessary to enable a computer to predict the ball's trajectory as well as the outfielder usually does. It will come as no surprise that the requirements were formidable enough to challenge the observational skills of astronomers and the speed of an IBM 360, let alone the intellectual equipment of the average protagonist of Ball Four. But suppose we want to explain the motion of the ball, or (as observers) to predict its point of fall. What better method do we have than to do by laborious calculation what the ballplayer usually succeeds in doing by sheerest intuition?74 Lest anyone feel that this divergence of theory from reality is an exclusive bane of the social sciences, it should be noted 72

See An Economic Theory of Democracy, chap. 3. Ibid., p. 21, and the further discussion at that point. 74 1 am grateful to Peter Ordeshook for having pointed out to me the similarity between this illustration and a much earlier one of which I had been unaware, that of Friedman and Savage's billiard player: Milton Friedman and L. J. Savage, "The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk," Journal of Political Economy 56 (1948): 279-304, at p. 298. 73

32

INTRODUCTION

that Newton faced the same problem between the first and second editions of the Principia: yes, people said, you can predict well enough the motions of bodies and the effects of gravity, but you have not told us how it works; what is gravity, anyway? Newton replied in his famous (and frequently misused) passage hypotheses non fingo: "hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses . . . to us it is enough that gravity really does exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained. . . ."75 For the social sciences it should be more than enough to discover laws according to which people act—even if they do not act that way consciously. A fourth possible argument against the rationalist thesis is far more difficult to answer than any of these first three. It is this: Would not any person who behaved rationally in politics accept only democratic systems of government? And if this is so, does not the manifest acceptance of non-democratic regimes and movements refute the thesis of rational political behavior? I have already asserted that it was this objection above all others that brought down classical rationalist theory. Its obvious force can be blunted in only one of two ways: either one must contend that people do not, in fact, accept nondemocratic rule; or one must admit that classical theory was wrong on this point and try to state the conditions under which people will rationally accept an undemocratic regime. I propose to take the latter course. The classical theory, I shall try to show, constitutes only a special case of a more general theory of rational legitimacy, and holds only under certain very limiting social conditions. Given the social developments of their own time, it was natural for the classical theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to think that these conditions held universally, or would soon do so. But subsequent history has turned out 75 Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles, trans. Andrew Motte, ed. Florian Cajori (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), 2:547 and notes at that point.

33

INTRODUCTION

differently. Their theory is not generally valid. I attempt in Chapter One to lay the foundations of a general theory. Chapter Two is devoted to a demonstration of the classical theory as a special case of general theory valid under specified social conditions; and the general theory is then employed, in Chapters Three through Five, to discover the rationally acceptable forms of government under other kinds of social conditions. There it will be seen that various nondemocratic regimes can be accepted by rational actors under specified conditions, regimes ranging from "consociational" systems through traditional hierarchical rule to various kinds of authoritarian or "totalitarian" domination. For each set of social conditions and corresponding political regime I shall bring forward by way of illustration concrete historical examples. These cannot serve as confirmation of the theory and are not so intended; they are advanced only to show that the otherwise rather abstract discussion has some connection with social and political reality, and is at least plausible in light of that reality. Confirmation or disconfirmation of a theory comes, in politics as in other sciences, less from any great amassing of data than from the persuasiveness of the theory's logic and the accuracy of its more daring hypotheses and predictions, often demonstrated in some "crucial experiment."76 The theory advanced here, like classical rationalist theory, is at least open to this kind of disconfirmation: indeed, testable hypotheses and predictions are advanced throughout Chapters Two through Five; and some of the predictions (as on the Common Market or Northern Ireland) are almost uncomfortably specific. But before testing must come the development of a theory logically consistent and exact enough to make the effort worthwhile. To develop such a theory is the aim of this essay. 76

For an elaboration of this view, see Anatol Rapoport, "Various Meanings of 'Theory,'" in James Rosenau, ed., International Politics and Foreign Policy (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1961), p. 44.

34

ONE

The General Framework of Constitutional Choice An Axiom, Terms, and Basic Notation Axiom 1: People's preferences among alternative governments, and their decisions to accept or to oppose existing governments, result from rational choice. Definition: A government will be taken to mean any pattern of human interaction that (a) results in decisions that are asserted to be binding for some specific group of people; (b) has the reliable potential of enforcing these decisions by physical coercion; (c) has some known rule or pattern for the making of these decisions (hereafter to be called the constitutional arrangement of the given government); and (d) is of unspecified duration, i.e., assumed for all practical purposes to be unlimited. It is useless to argue the merit of definitions, but it is possible to clarify and to illustrate them. By this definition, extended families in many societies would have been governments; but most present-day Western families would not be, since their domination is limited in time. As this example illustrates, the definition abandons the Weberian criterion that a government must have a monopoly of (legitimate) force and admits that one person may be subject to more than one government: either harmoniously, as in many federal systems, or not, as in guerrilla warfare. A government's constitutional arrangement is simply its normal way of making decisions, regardless of the extent to which this is formalized. In simple cases, it may be straightforward autoc35

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

racy, oligarchy, or democracy; in more complex instances, it may contain elaborate checks and balances, or establish one mechanism for making ordinary decisions and another for changing the way in which decisions are made ("amend­ ments" of the constitution). Even anarchy can be a constitu­ tional arrangement for a government whose only binding decision is that no binding decisions may be made. Definition: Let us define rational choice by an actor as follows: Let A1, A2, . . . , An represent alternative, mutually exclusive courses of action that appear to him jointly to exhaust all possibilities; let O1, O2, • . . , Om represent mu­ tually exclusive outcomes, which also appear to the actor to be jointly exhaustive; let c(Ok, e-A,) represent the prob­ ability, estimated by the actor on the basis of available evidence e, that the pursuit of course of action A, will lead to outcome Ok; and let « b e a von Neumann-Morgenstern mapping1 which assigns a numerical utility, for the given actor, to each outcome (u(Ok)) and to the costs of pursuing each course of action (u(A,)). Then for each A1 define an expectation value u'(Ah e) such that u'(A„ e) = C(O1, C-A1)U(O1)

+ C(O2,

C-Aj)U(O2)

+

. . . +

c(Om,

e-A,)

u(Om) — u(Aj). Then we will say that the actor chooses rationally if and only if he chooses that course which maxi­ mizes his expectation value: i.e., that whose expectation 2 value is not exceeded by that of any other course of action. 1

That is to say, it must be true of u that, for any two "natural" utilities ν and w such that v>w (read: ν is preferable to w), (1) v>w—*«(v)>«(w), and (2) for all α such that 0 < α < 1 , « ( a v + ( l — a ) w ) = a i / ( v ) + (l—a)tt(vf). See John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), chap. 3 and appendix. 2 As Friedman and Savage have pointed out, the notion that ration­ ality must be defined by expected, or probability-weighted, utility is "an ancient idea" that was "revived and given new content by von Neumann and Morgenstern"; they trace it through Bernoulli back to the mathematician Gabriel Cramer (1704-1752). Milton Friedman

36

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

It may not be immediately clear how this kind of rationality can lead us to an analysis of people's governmental preferences, but a few elaborations will help. (The definition, incidentally, is not so complicated as it seems at first, as the reader will see if he works through it, letting the outcomes represent victories of political candidates in some election and the courses of action, voting for one of the candidates, taking each in turn, or not voting.)3 Governments have been defined as makers of binding decisions: they make a series of such decisions, and this series is of unspecified duration, presumptively unlimited. About each of these decisions only one of two things can be true for any given citizen: either (a) he uniquely determined the outcome of the decision; or (b) he did not.4 and L. J. Savage, "The Utility Analysis of Choices Involving Risk," Journal of Political Economy 56 (1948): 279-304, at p. 303 and p. 28 In. There is naturally considerable diversity in the terms and notation employed: for possibly idiosyncratic reasons, I have here chosen the system of Carnap as modified by Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 7475. I have altered the definition presented there only by adding the factor of the cost of the various courses of action, it having seemed to me unreasonable not to do so. In particular, the use of the term "expectation value," as opposed to the more customary "expected value," owes to Carnap; it seems to me to help alleviate the possible confusion (noted also by Friedman and Savage) between "expected value" and "value of the expected income": "Choices Involving Risk," p. 303. 3 Attempts actually to analyze voting behavior in this way have of course been made, but these have had their problems: see for example Thomas W. Casstevens, "A Theorem about Voting," APSR 62 (1968): 205-207, and the apt criticism of Gerald H. Kramer, APSR 62 (1968): 955-956, as well as William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook, "A Theory of the Calculus of Voting," APSR 62 (1968): 2542, and the criticisms of this essay advanced in Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists and Democracy (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1970), pp. 15-18. 4 Cf. the notion of the "pivotal" voter in L. S. Shapley and Martin Shubik, "A Method for Evaluating the Distribution of Power in a Committee System," APSR 48 (1954): 787-792.

37

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

The notion of unique determination of a decision is difficult but quite useful. Let us begin to grasp it by means of examples. Imagine first an absolute autocracy: one person decides every issue, and of course decides before that what issues are to be raised; his word, as they say, is law. Surely it is accurate to say that such an autocrat uniquely determines the outcome of every decision, even if there is general agreement with what he decides; for although in some cases twothirds of the people may agree with his actions, he prevails just as surely when he is a minority of one. Consider now a second kind of autocracy, one in which the dictator is chosen anew for each decision from among all the adult citizens, by lot. Each day, we could imagine, the citizens assemble; each writes his proposal for a decision on a paper that is placed in a capsule; the capsules are shaken in a drum and one is drawn out; the proposal that it contains becomes law without further discussion or action. Surely we must admit that for his single decision the citizen whose lot is drawn uniquely determines the outcome: just as with the longer-lived autocrat, his decision may find general approbation; but even if it does not, it prevails, and for that decision other opinions are irrelevant. So far, I hope, so clear. But let us now take up the case of a direct democracy in which all things are decided by majority vote of all adult citizens. Regular meetings are held, at which citizens may propose measures in the order in which they "catch the chairman's eye"; and if this rough lottery is contested, a more exact one may be held, so that each citizen has exactly the same chance of being allowed to initiate a decision. Suppose that under this system a measure is proposed and passed: who, if anyone, has "uniquely determined" the outcome? It might reasonably be argued that in some sense all members of the majority had done so equally, or had done so with equal probability; but in fact it was the proposer of the measure, as can be seen if the above model is altered by providing that only one citizen may propose decisions. If 38

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

this were the case, it would follow that those not allowed to make proposals could never determine positive decisions, only negative ones: positive decisions would always be uniquely determined by the one who had the right to propose; negative ones always by those who lacked that right. Where all have the right to propose, a given decision is uniquely determined by the proposer, if the decision is positive. But suppose that the proposal fails of adoption. Obviously the proposer has not now determined the outcome, since his wishes ran the other way; by the same argument, it cannot have been anyone who voted with the losing side. But among the victorious ranks of the "nays" we cannot pinpoint a unique determiner, save in the sense (often used where voting is open) that some one person's vote put the winning side "over the top"; and where the vote is taken simultaneously, let alone secretly, this one person is all but impossible to determine. Here we must revert to our first impulse and say that all are equally likely to have determined the result uniquely: if 50 have voted against, and prevailed, each is 1/50 likely to have been the unique decider. Suppose now, for reasons that should become obvious shortly, that a citizen wished to know in advance the probability of his uniquely determining the outcome of a random future decision under each of these three constitutional arrangements. Under the first, his probability is clearly zero unless he intends to become the autocrat, in which case it is unity: since the autocrat determines the outcome of every decision, he determines each of them with certainty. Under the pure lottery system, on the other hand, the probability is I/N, where N is the total number of adult citizens. If the lottery is honest, each citizen has the same chance as any other of becoming dictator for a random decision. Finally, and somewhat less obviously, the system of majority rule—or indeed of rule by any specified ratio (1/4, 1/3, 2/3, etc.)— will also lead to a universal probability of \/N of uniquely determining the random outcome (see Appendix 1.1). Now the actor can view the continuing series of govern39

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE

mental decisions as providing him with a steady stream of utilities (or of course by implication disutilities). For each decision, the utility that flows from uniquely determining the outcome will be greater than or equal to the utility that flows from not so determining it (equal utilities would of course imply indifference between the two outcomes). If we let D 1 , D2, and so on represent the sequence of decisions and use A i and D12 to represent, respectively, uniquely determining and not uniquely determining the outcome of the /th decision, then we can write this stream of potential utilities as M(D 1 ) --= C(D11, C ) M ( D n ) + C(D12, C)M(D 1 2 ),

U(D2) = C(D21, e)u(D21)

+ c(D22, e)u(D22),

etc.,

where c(DlU e) and c(Dv2, e) represent the actor's estimate on the basis of evidence e of, respectively, uniquely determining and not uniquely determining the outcome of the ith decision. (By definition of course c(DlU e) = 1 — c(Di2, e).) As we have just seen, these probabilities will vary with different constitutional arrangements. If we allow Gi, G2, . . . , Gk to represent the condition of the existence and functioning of each of the k alternative governments (including his present one, if any) which our actor imagines, then for any given decision D 1 he can compare U(DcG1) = C(Dn, e-Gx)u(Dxl) U(DsG1) = c(D{1, e-Gk)u(DiX)

+ c(Dx2, C-G1)M(D12) + c(Di2, e-Gh)u(Di2)

and decide which government would be preferable, on grounds of its constitutional arrangement alone, for that decision. Now it may well be that a single governmental decision, or some class of decisions, is so important to an actor that a government that assured him of uniquely determining decisions in that sphere (even by simply guaranteeing in advance that no decisions of that kind would be made) would be preferable to all others, even if it reduced him to relative impotence on all other decisions: thus the Jews of Spain are

40

FRAMEWORK OF CONSTITUTIONAL CHOICE reported to have been loyal to Moorish rule, although it could not precisely be described as a liberal democracy, because it left them free to practice their religion while the Christian alternatives did not. On the whole, however, it seems intolerably risky to judge governmental alternatives on the basis of such special exceptions, not least because a second governmental decision is always required to determine whether a future case in fact fits the exception: does pro­ posal A actually touch on freedom of religion, or only on taxation? would proposal B really infringe freedom of speech? is a constitutional amendment really required to enact proposal C? The power of making decisions of this kind (called by German jurists the Kompetenzkompetenz) then becomes the power about which the actor cares; and "deals" of this kind therefore only remove the question one step while leaving it essentially one of "How are decisions made?" rather than "What decisions are made?" 5 Ordinarily, then, it will be easier to base one's preference on the likely outcome of a random future decision. If we let D represent the random future decision and take U(D 0 1 ) and H(D02) to mean the respective average utilities of uniquely determining and not uniquely determining the outcome of D, then for government G11 u(D-Gk)

= C(D01, + C(D02,

e-Gk)ii(D01) e-Gk)U(D02).

But since the utility scales we are employing allow linear transformations, we can choose such a transformation φ such that (u(D02)) = 0, let u' = c(£) 0 i, e-Gi), it must follow that w(Gk, e)c(D01, e-Gk) > W(G1, e)c(D01,

^G1).

But from this it follows by definition that the actor perceives G1, or existing government, as rationally illegitimate.2 To turn this rather abstract finding into a testable hypothesis we must now introduce an axiom about perceptions, which will also be essential to our later discussion: Axiom 2: People's perceptions rest on their experience; and any belief that is consistently contradicted either by direct experience or by easily available information will be modified into closer conformity with the facts.3 This axiom implies, I hope accurately, that the rational legitimacy of governments can never be supported for long by fraud alone, and that inequalities in political influence will—if government touches the lives of its subjects at all— 2

It may well be asked at this point whether our logic would forbid carpenters' being given higher probabilities of unique determination if carpentry were an "open" occupation, i.e., if all members of the society had an equal opportunity to enter it. Of course this would be possible; but "equal opportunity" would then have to be taken quite seriously: carpenters would have to be selected by what amounted to a lottery, repeated often enough, and with so few barriers, as not to deprive any member of hope of being selected. Such a privileged profession would be, in fact, analogous to governmental office in the subsequent discussion. 3 Cf. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson, 1957).

57

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

be found out. It implies also, however, that inaccurate perceptions of inferior influence will eventually be corrected. A government would be most stable if it could be rationally legitimate to all its subjects. We have seen that in wholly interchangeable society some members will find the existing government rationally illegitimate whenever an inequality of probabilities of unique determination is perceived; and by Axiom 2 such an inequality will be perceived unless the probabilities are in fact equal, in which case no inequality will be perceived for long. Hence we can say: H2.1: A government will be rationally legitimate to all members of a wholly interchangeable society if and only if it gives to each of them equal probabilities of uniquely determining the outcome of the random governmental decision. This is a long way from saying that such a government will be established; it is only to say that no other kind of government will be likely to survive for long if its decisions are at all important to the people (cf. H l . l ) . If we find any case of an actual society that has approached total interchangeability and that has a reasonably long-lived government, we can predict that its institutions will have to give nearly equal probabilities of unique determination. But what kind of institutions would those be? JUDICIAL INSTITUTIONS IN WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

Judicial institutions are aspects of even the most rudimentary societies, and by their powers to settle disputes and inflict punishments they affect people's lives at least as directly as any other part of government. Bloch therefore remarks with justice that "there is no better touchstone for a social system" than the question, "How were men tried?"4 Our question, for the moment, is different: how would men have to be tried to preserve the rational legitimacy of 4

Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 359.

58

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

government for everyone in a wholly interchangeable society? We may observe, however, one certainty about every government, real or ideal, which would be staffed by real people: that however men would be tried, they would never be tried perfectly. Ideally, all who follow courses of action defined as criminal would be punished, and all who eschew such courses of action would escape punishment. But judicial errors always occur, acquitting some who are guilty by law and the facts, and convicting some who are innocent by the same criteria. We are concerned with two questions about judicial errors: their number and their distribution. As the number of errors increases, things become less predictable for all members of society; but so long as their distribution remains unbiased, people's probabilities of unique determination stay equal, and rational legitimacy is not immediately lost. (It would of course be a different matter if people came to believe that an equally workable arrangement would be able to reduce the number of errors without introducing bias; but this is at least problematical.) If, however, any bias at all arises in the distribution of judicial errors, legitimacy—as we have seen— is lost at once, at least among the group against whom the bias is effective. How, then, is the distribution of error to be kept unbiased? Only one sure way suggests itself: deliberately to randomize the incidence of such errors. The most direct and brutal way of accomplishing this would be to apply the notion of randomization literally: any dispute could conceivably be resolved by some impersonal and perfectly random device— casting of lots, flipping of coins, trials by combat or by ordeal. These would, if fairly conducted, eliminate bias;5 but they would create an enormous number of errors: odds of 0.5 of conviction, regardless of guilt or innocence, would not strike most people as the best of all possible arrangements. Hence some "thinking" random device would ordinarily 3 This assumes, of course, equal chances of being haled before judicial institutions in the first place. See below, n. 10.

59

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

seem preferable: one in which some person—a "judge"— would at least try to apply existing rules and standards of proof, but in which the errors of that judge would still somehow be randomized. One way of so randomizing error would be to insist that both (or all) parties to a dispute must agree on their judge: if he were acceptable to all disputants, one could assume that he was perceived as biased against none of them. But suppose no such agreement could be reached? Judgment could not be postponed indefinitely, for that would only encourage the guilty to reject all proposed judges. Some "fallback" method must exist, but one that is equally immune to bias. Before, we talked of deciding the case by a random device; would it not make sense under these altered conditions to choose the judge (or judges) by random devices? Granted one additional condition, it would. Since we are still assuming the existence of a wholly interchangeable society, we know that all members are perceived as equally competent to judge, so that no greater number of errors is to be expected from random selection than from any other method. But what of the distribution of these errors? Here the problem of jaction enters in. Consider a case in which one party to a dispute had no family at all in the society, while the other disputant belonged to a fiercely loyal clan so large that its members made up a third of the whole society. Would the isolated party, if he were in his senses, agree to random selection of a judge from this society? Obviously not, since if the clan always voted to support its members, the isolated individual would have a probability of only 1/3 of obtaining a judge who would err in his favor, while his opponent would have a probability of 2/3 of gaining this advantage. Definition: By a faction will be meant any subset of the members of a society who consistently and consciously co60

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

ordinate their political actions, at least to the extent of voting as a bloc.6 We may thus state one further condition for the rational legitimacy of selecting judges by lot in a wholly interchangeable society: that the society have no factions. If this condition is met, random selection will work; and if it will, so will votes of the whole people, or of any random part of them. For what is the effect of a random sample but to represent accurately a larger universe? If the sample is "unbiased," both in the statistical sense and in the one we have been using here, must not the universe—the whole society—also be unbiased? We see that it is constitutionally indifferent—except from the standpoint of efficiency— whether judgment is given by randomly selected judges or jurors, or to assemblies of the whole people. EMPIRICAL CASES OF JUDICIAL PROCESS

We should now pause to ask whether the institutions to which the earlier assumptions and logic have brought us bear any correspondence to reality. So far as we know, the early Roman civil and criminal courts employed jurors (judices) who had either to be acceptable to both parties, or to be chosen by lot. At a later date, however, these courts were accused of having taken on an aristocratic bias; and the lex Valeria allowed the appeal of their capital sentences to the assemblies of the whole people.7 At Athens, it was Solon who introduced the selection of large (up to 1,500 members) juries by lot, which Aristotle tells us were thought to show less "favoritism."8 And in feudal Europe, according to Bloch, trial by a jury of 0

Cf. Robin Farquharson, Theory of Voting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), Appendix in, "A Game as 'Model' for Du Contrat Social." 7 Howard H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World from 753 to 146 B.C., 3rd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), p. 99. 8 Athenaion Politeia 49.3.

61

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

one's own peers, or by assemblies of the whole population, was always accepted as "the right . . . of persons of even the most modest rank."9 It need hardly be mentioned in addition that Anglo-Saxon juries are still chosen, at least ideally, by lot from among all adult citizens of the area of jurisdiction. I will leave to one side for the moment the question of whether these institutions have appeared in real societies that approach the ideal of total interchangeability; I shall not even try to operationalize this notion until a little later on. We can be satisfied for the moment that institutions have existed that have attempted to randomize bias in the ways predicted. Yet other judicial institutions have also existed and also been recognized as fair and legitimate in their respective societies. Judges have been elected rather than chosen by lot, or they have been appointed on the basis of special training in the law; and superiors have been accorded the right to judge inferiors in feudal, military, and industrial situations. Are these things logically forbidden in wholly interchangeable societies? They are. The customary argument in favor of trained and appointed judges, for example, is that their greater ability will reduce the amount of judicial error. But in wholly interchangeable society, all are by definition equally able; and, more importantly, the danger of bias is increased, unless one believes absolutely that no appointive judge will be swayed in trying one of his colleagues. Even elective judges are not immune from this suspicion of bias, at least during their terms of office. Hence such arrangements could hardly be perceived as rationally legitimate in this kind of society, although they might well be in other kinds. Wholly interchangeable society, if it is to have rationally legitimate political authority, must employ something like the completely randomizing institutions already described. '» Bloch, Feudal Society, pp. 361, 368.

62

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY LEGISLATIVE INSTITUTIONS IN WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

If the law preceded all the living and were completely known and fixed, we should be able to conclude our inquiry with the examination of judicial processes—as indeed it is alleged we can for many ancient and some still-existing societies. But in most cultures the age of "found" law is past, and that of "made" law has begun—as it did in the West even in late Medieval times. We must therefore add to our examination of requisite judicial institutions a consideration of legislative processes, and of the requirements of their rational legitimacy in wholly interchangeable society. Again, the minimal requirement is for equality of probabilities of unique determination of decisions. This demand could be satisfied, just as in the case of adjudication, by a "mechanical" kind of randomness: that is, one could agree that each measure introduced (provided that all members have equal opportunity to propose measures)10 should be decided upon by a lottery-like device with some fixed probability (which need not, as we shall see, be .5) of a "yes" outcome. Such a device, just as in the case of adjudication, would eliminate bias; but I argued there that it would also introduce a high amount of error, and that therefore human judges (provided their errors could be randomized) would be better. But is there any such thing as "error" in the legislative case? Certainly not in the same sense. Legislation deals by definition with the making of rules and not with their application; hence it cannot "err" in any positivist sense.11 But even as 10 This was of course implicit in the discussion of adjudication as well. We could not have argued, for example, that members would be satisfied with equal probabilities of outcomes in the courts if at the same time some group in the society were completely immune to the whole process of adjudication, or if some other group had no access to it. 11 This fact appears at first to leave things so much at sea that it was intolerable to most of the early contract theorists, whose school arose

63

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

an individual can say of some voluntary act of his own that it was an "error," so errors of collective decision-making can arise. And just as an individual might wish to guard himself against acting, out of ignorance or haste or passion, in ways he would later regret, so the collectivity might seek to avoid such errors. For this task, human legislators are obviously better than mechanical ones, provided they can be kept unbiased. And this can be done only if the legislators are chosen in the same way as the judges: either as a random sample of the whole society, or as an assembly of the whole society. (The whole society might vote in various ways, however, including even the sending of strictly mandated deputies to a central point.) Again, the restrictions on factions and on size would have to be upheld (as Rousseau, for example, saw),12 or else recourse had to an "outside" arbiter. In short, wholly interchangeable society appears to lead rational actors to demand, in legislative as well as in judicial process, a very direct and unfactionalized democracy. Much of this has been recognized by recent theorists, most largely in response to the Western transition from "found" to "made" law. Rousseau in particular argued the necessity of what would now be called a "general welfare function": a unique answer, on every proposed rule, eventually obvious to every rational and moral member of the society and separable from the merely private interests of any of them, to the question, "Is this of advantage to the State?" JeanJacques Rousseau, "The Social Contract," in Ernest Barker, ed., Social Contract (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 271. If this question could be answered uniquely in all circumstances, departures from it could of course rightly be regarded as error, just as Rousseau goes on to argue (ibid., p. 273). But can it? Suppose that I, together with one-tenth of the other members of my society, believe that a certain available sum of public money should be spent on beautification, while the other nine-tenths hold that it should be devoted to the improvement of the roads. By what criterion can either of us be certain that the other group is wrong, and that what we propose is of greater advantage to the state? There is of course no such criterion; but neither do we need one to have a rational theory of political legitimacy. 12 Rousseau, "Social Contract," p. 194.

64

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

notably by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their important work, The Calculus of Consent.13 But one of their conclusions requires fuller discussion here, namely that bearing on the size of majority that a strict rationalist would require of a constitutional arrangement. Buchanan and Tullock argued forcefully, to the consternation of many students of earlier theory, that majority rule was nothing more than a convention, a "prominent solution" of a problem that had many possible solutions. Indeed, they showed, a strict application of the Pareto criterion would lead to a constitutional arrangement of unanimity rule, from which the rational member would depart only to the extent that "decision-making costs" offset his gains from unanimity rule. This departure, moreover, would not necessarily be majority rule; it could be nine-tenths rule, two-thirds rule, simple majority, or even one-third rule.14 13

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1965. 14 For a fuller discussion of the arguments raised by Buchanan and Tullock, see above, pp. 47-48. I cannot, for once, see the sense in a contention by Brian Barry that "the whole idea of 'minority rule' in the sense of minority power to authorize action is absurd since there is nothing to stop different minorities passing conflicting laws within a few minutes of each other." Political Argument (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 314. Such power, first of all, exists in some special cases without seeming to effect any of the absurdities Barry fears: any two U.S. Senators can close a session of the Senate; any four Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court can require it to hear a case; and in many individual states, specified minorities—usually less than ten percent—can use the "initiative" to compel a referendum on a measure they favor. In regard to the possibility of a more general minority power, Barry is simply showing lack of imagination. Suppose that a legislative body met only once each year; at its meeting, one member would be chosen by lot, and he alone would be allowed to propose a new law; when the vote was taken, the measure would be considered passed if as many as forty percent (Barry's illustration) were in favor; and, regardless of the outcome, the body would be adjourned immediately after the vote for another year. No danger there of a "conflicting law within a few minutes"; and, so far as I can see, no danger either of "a determinate

65

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

What does our analysis say about this? So far as the distribution of error is concerned, Buchanan and Tullock appear to be right. So long as the proportion required for passage is equal for all members and for all issues, bias is eliminated.15 Only if some members' proposals could be passed by majority while others' required two-thirds, or if (for example) taxation measures required sixty percent while freedom of speech could be restricted by a simple majority, would rational legitimacy cease—in both cases, for those who needed the larger majority.16 Since bias is eliminated by any uniform requirement for passage—even, if the members somehow choose it, 56.42 percent—the question turns instead on the minimization of error. As William Baumol has pointed out in his comments on Buchanan and Tullock's work, it is by no means evident that error, or the "external costs of decision-making," is minimized by unanimity rule, since inaction may be as erroneous (in the present sense) as action. Indeed, if we assume what nearly all parliamentary procedures allow, that any question may be phrased at will in a positive or a negative mode, then it is random whether, on a given proposal, even the most "conservative" member (i.e., the one most disposed to favor inaction) would best attain his wishes by favoring passage or defeat of a given pending measure.17 group of 'minority rulers'" (Barry's other bogey about less-thanmajority rule). 15 This point was made also by Locke and Rousseau. John Locke, "Second Treatise on Civil Government," in Barker, ed., Social Contract, p. 58. Rousseau, "Social Contract," p. 274. 16 For those who are still doubtful on this point, it can perhaps be seen more clearly if we return to the analogous case of mechanically random decision-making. If all proposed measures were submitted to a roulette wheel for decision, but one group's proposals were passed if the ball landed on any of half the spaces, while another's could be defeated by any of two-thirds of them, the bias would be evident. 17 Cf. Kenneth O. May, "A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision," Econometrica

66

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

This being so, there is somewhat more sense to majority rule than its mere prominence; but it may nonetheless be true that a society that is generally "conservative"—i.e., one whose members believe the dangers of foolish action to outweigh those of foolish inaction—might wish to require a special majority.18 We may now refer back to adjudication and note that the same logic holds there: one need not have equal odds between plaintiffs and defendants, but only equal odds for all plaintiffs. Thus one might wish to weight error in favor of the defendant, and hence to require a unanimous judgment of jurors—as Anglo-Saxon justice generally does. We can conclude that, if the end in view is the guarantee to all members of the society of equal probabilities of unique determination, legislative institutions will have to resemble the judicial ones already discussed in all respects save, perhaps, the size of the bodies, the manner of taking votes, and the majority required for decisions; and we can state as a corollary to H2.1 C2.1.1: In any wholly interchangeable society that is without factions, a government will be rationally legitimate to all members if and only if its constitutional arrangements are primarily characterized, both in judicial and legislative institutions, by direct democracy and/or election by lot. 20 (1952): 680-684, in which this property—which May calls "neutrality"—is shown to be sufficient, when coupled with egalitarianism and the more elementary conditions of decisiveness and positive responsiveness, for a unique specification of majority rule. 18 The seminal paper on this point is Douglas Rae, "Decision-rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice," American Political Science Review (APSR) 63 (1969): 40-56. For a much more comprehensive and technically more satisfactory treatment, see the subsequent essay by Wade W. Badger, "Political Individualism, Positional Preferences, and Optimal Decision-Rules," in Richard G. Niemi and Herbert F. Weisberg, eds., Probability Models of Collective DecisionMaking (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 34-59, esp. pp. 48-49.

67

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

EMPIRICAL CASES OF LEGISLATIVE PROCESS

Once again, we must ask whether experience shows any parallels to these theoretical results. The best-known real approach to our model will certainly be the Periclean constitution of Athens as it existed by 429 B.C.19 Its main features were as follows. The citizens were divided by lot into ten tribes, and from each of these fifty representatives were selected annually, again by lot. These five hundred deputies together formed the Council, and each tribe's delegation became in turn its presiding committee for one-tenth of the year; the order of rotation was determined, again, by lot. Each day, a new chairman was selected from the presiding committee—by lot. The presiding committee maintained an official residence and had a common table, thus keeping them on permanent call. They also prepared the agenda for the daily meetings of the whole Council and the roughly weekly (forty each year) meetings of the Assembly of the whole male citizenry. The Assembly alone could legislate. Originally, it could act only on proposals previously approved by the Council; but later, it assumed the power to amend these, or to order the Council to propose a bill on a given subject.20 Finally, the various "executive" officials, who in most cases were literally that, were chosen almost entirely by lot, with the major exception of the strategia, or generals, and the minor exceptions of a few ad hoc posts—architects, envoys, financial commissioners.21 All officials were subject to the oversight of the Council and the Assembly, and to later impeachment for unpopular actions. More contemporary examples of such democratic rigor are harder to find. Tocqueville's vision of the Jacksonian democracy in America would approach the ideal type, if the 19

The account here follows Aristotle, Athenaion Politeia, 42-69, but takes into account also the authoritative discussion of C. Hignett, A History of the Athenian Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). 20 Hignett, Athenian Constitution, p. 243. 21 Ibid., p. 244.

68

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

majority had been as powerful as he believed; but it nonetheless elected by ballot and not (except in the case of the admittedly often political juries) by lot. If we turn, however, to more primitive contemporary societies, we find still, as Landtman informs us, that "tribal authority is exercised almost universally in the democratic form of a general council," and that, although a council of elders may enjoy considerable influence, decisions are rarely considered binding until accepted by a mass meeting of the whole tribe.22 Similar observations have been made also by later students.23 Do REAL SOCIETIES EVER APPROACH TOTAL INTERCHANGEABILITY?

Recall the definition of wholly interchangeable society with which this chapter began: a society in which every member regards every other as equally competent (or incompetent) in the performance of socially necessary tasks. What, in real societies, is likely to instill anything close to this belief? According to Axiom 2, perceptions approaching total interchangeability could originate in only one way: H2.2: Perceptions of high interchangeability24 will arise in a society if and only if occupational mobility in the society is in fact high and harmless to efficiency. In other words, people will come to be perceived as interchangeable only if they are seen to change occupations easily and competently. 22 Gunnar Landtman, The Origin of the Inequality of the Social Classes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), pp. 310, 316. 23 Lucy Mair, Primitive Government, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), chap. 3. 24 At this point I make the assumption—perhaps not justified for reasons I cannot see—that societies that approach the pole of total interchangeability will behave very much like ones that had actually reached it. By "high" interchangeability I shall mean that changes of occupation can be carried out at little cost to efficiency: thus the view that "anyone can learn any job in a few days," or that "one person's about as good at a job as another," would be a perception of high, but not total, interchangeability.

69

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

But if this is the only way in which perceptions of interchangeability can arise, it is far from being the only way in which they can persist. By Axiom 2, a belief once instilled will be altered only if direct experience or easily available evidence contradicts it. Few people can have direct experience of the occupational mobility of more than a small proportion of the members of any large society; hence they are thrown back on information which may well not be easy to come by. Consider a society in which occupational mobility had once been high and efficient. By H2.2, a perception of high interchangeability must have arisen. But suppose now that mobility comes to be inefficient (because some group of exceptional skill, or of exceptional lack of it, appears within the society); or that mobility simply declines. People surely would notice the change in their sphere of direct experience; but they would not go readily from these few cases to the view that people generally were no longer interchangeable. Indeed, experimental evidence of human perceptions makes it more than likely that they would write off these few cases as rare exceptions, flukes not worth explaining.25 So long as people in all occupations continued to seem pretty much alike—so long as they had the same rough racial, sexual, ethnic, and cultural makeup as the general population and spoke, acted, and lived much as everyone else—it would also seem, on the basis of what information was readily available, that people must still interchange fairly easily among positions. Only if skill or occupation came to be correlated with such easily identifiable characteristics would the fact of decreased interchange be evident to all. If a dark skin identifies one as a manual laborer; if all holders of high political office have public-school accents and manners; if all women are housewives, or all housewives women; then the perception of easy interchange, and hence of interchangeability, cannot survive. 25

Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. 6, pp. 52-65.

70

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

(The same holds, of course, if persons with these easily identifiable characteristics are not confined to specific positions, but have noticeably lower or higher levels of skill at particular occupations; but this condition will ordinarily lead to the one already described.) Definition: Any characteristic of a group of persons that is (a) easily identifiable by others in their society and (b) capable of being changed only at high cost if at all will be called a stigma. H2.3: Once inculcated in a society's members, a perception of high interchangeability will be abandoned if and only if particular skills or particular occupations come to be correlated with the possession of particular stigmata. Finally, we can combine H2.2 and H2.3 with C2.1.1 to obtain C2.1.2: If a society (a) has high rates of occupational mobility without any apparent loss of efficiency, or (b) has had such mobility in the past and as yet exhibits no correlation of particular stigmata with particular skills or occupations; and (c) has no factions; then its government will be rationally legitimate to all its members if and only if its constitutional arrangements are primarily characterized, both in judicial and legislative institutions, by direct democracy and/or election by lot. These hypotheses describe for us with some precision the constitutional arrangements to be expected in societies that approach the pole of total interchangeability. But it is important to know also the institutional changes to be expected as one moves away from that pole, even while still remaining in its neighborhood. This is the aim of the next section. EFFECTS OF MODIFIED INTERCHANGEABILITY

Real societies are more likely to be characterized by perceptions of modified interchangeability than by ones of total interchangeability. Under modified interchangeability, mem71

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

bers of the society will still deny that individuals are born or otherwise ascriptively assigned to different "callings"; but they will admit that different people may show different apti­ tudes, need different amounts of training, or show different degrees of application in the pursuit of different occupations. Let us consider here one specific case of such perceptions, in which the admission of possibly unequal talents would apply only to roles of political leadership. That is, some members of the society, in pursuing the course of action of (let us say) leading a meeting or commanding troops in the field, are perceived to have a higher probability of successful outcomes than are others. Now in wholly interchangeable society, nothing was lost by filling roles of this kind through election by lot, since all were by definition equally capable. Under our modified assumption this is no longer the case: "properly" selected leaders, generals, or judges will commit fewer errors than will "improperly" selected ones. Indeed, the benefits that the rest of society may derive from this increased competence will at some point even outweigh the higher probabilities of unique determination that might accrue to such "chosen" leaders. In other words, one particular kind of bias—but one only— could be justified rationally in this kind of case, namely a bias in favor of the political officials. All others—all who were not members of the class of officials—would have still to be equal before the law, to enjoy equal political coeffi­ cients. How could this be achieved? The most obvious way would be to return to the logic invoked earlier with regard to judgments and policies, and to apply it now to persons: the only safely unbiased judges of the abilities of candidates for political leadership would have to be the people themselves, or a randomly selected sample of them. Thus the relaxation of interchangeability in this one regard would lead us to "democracy" as most contemporaries (although not the ancients) think of it: as α system of filling offices of political leadership by popular vote. Our analysis can carry us one step farther. Surely the

72

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

clearest indicators of the degree of constitutional bias in favor of officeholders are, first, their powers to act independently and, second, the length of their terms, i.e., the time in which they remain immune to popular control. Hence the greater the degree of possible inequality of ability that is perceived in a society, the greater will be the powers of independent action granted to its elective officials, and the longer will be their terms. We may state these conclusions in another hypothesis: H2.4: The farther a society moves from the pole of total interchangeability, provided that it does not become a segmented society (see Chapter Four), and provided also that it is without factions, the more likely it is to elect its officials by vote rather than lot, and the longer will be the terms and the greater the powers that will be granted to its elective officials. Do INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETIES EXIST?

Probably no real society could reach the pole of total interchangeability: stratifications according to age, for example, seem to exist everywhere. Typically, the extreme has been approached only by subgroups of societies: all adults, or all free adults, or all free adult males, or all free adult male citizens. Within these restrictions, however, can we find anything like total interchangeability? And did that approach have the political structures which our hypotheses would indicate? I have already indicated that Cleisthenes' Athens provides, both in the judicial and in the legislative sphere, the closest approach to the constitutional arrangements that the theory would assign to wholly interchangeable societies. It may therefore reward us to look more closely at the attitudes and at the social constitution of that time and place. With regard to perceptions of interchangeability, J. S. Morrison asserts that the fundamental belief of Athenians of that age was that "no one [was] better qualified than anyone else by breeding, intellectual power, or specific training to

73

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

direct public policy."26 This belief led to the most extreme form of direct democracy yet seen. But what engendered so strong a belief in social interchangeability? It would have to follow on the reasoning presented here either that stigmata did not correlate with skills or occupations among the adult male citizenry, or that great occupational mobility must have preceded and accompanied the perceptual and political changes. There is evidence that the latter was the case. Four specific developments can be emphasized in this regard:27 1. Advances in military technology, by rendering obsolete the privately outfitted cavalry in favor of the massed hoplites and the proletarian, publicly outfitted navy, destroy the special competence of the wealthy in the area of defense. The poor and the non-noble assume military tasks for which they had previously been thought unsuited. 2. The absence of a rule of primogeniture and the end of territorial expansion combine to impoverish the noble families and to turn many of them from rentiers and warriors into tradesmen. Thus there is considerable downward mobility in this regard. 3. The same parcellization of land and the introduction of major grain imports reduce the independent farmers to sharecropping or slavery.28 4. The rise of commerce and of manufactures creates a class of nouveaux riches whose wealth is out of all proportion to their traditional (ascriptive, or stigmatic) social status. In sum, the older Athenian society appears to have consisted of four main segments: Noble, landowning warriors; independent farmers; tradesmen, mostly foreign; and slaves. 26

"The Place of Protagoras in Athenian Public Life," Classical Quarterly 8 (1941), cited in Alvin W. Gouldner, Enter Plato (New York and London: Basic Books, 1965), p. 135. 27 J. Hasebroek, Griechische Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte bis zur Perserzeit (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1931). 28 For a convincing substantiation of this development and its political results, see A. French, "The Economic Background to Solon's Reforms," Classical Quarterly n.s. 6 (1956): 11-25.

74

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE SOCIETY

In the period of change preceding the reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, the lines between these groups were blurred to the point of disappearance: nobles went into trade, tradesmen rose to the wealth of nobility, farmers and tradesmen rose to the military skills formerly reserved to the nobility, and many farmers fell into slavery. A more thorough mixing can hardly be imagined, and this will surely have accounted for the amazingly widespread—although by no means unanimous—acceptance that the reforms found.29 Jacksonian America represented by no means so drastic an example of direct democracy, but Tocqueville rightly observed that in it the majority ruled almost untrammeled, dividing the governmental power among a great number of offices and granting it only for very short terms, seldom more than a year.30 He associated this with a belief in equality of ability: except for a certain "influence of intellect" men were believed equally able to administer; and he attributed this belief to the more general social equality that obtained where "every profession is open to all, when a multitude of persons are constantly embracing and abandoning it," where "ranks are intermingled and men are forever rising or sinking in the social scale."31 Finally, we may note that even among primitive societies, the most "direct" and "democratic" governments—in the sense of allowing no preeminence save that based on age and sex—have been observed always where the division of labor is least advanced, or where all the essential functions can be carried out by every member.32 Evidence of the kind offered here cannot be conclusive. One would have to know the extent of the mobility, compare 29

French, ibid., emphasizes this degree of acceptance as the great mystery for the historian. 30 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:70, 87-89. si Ibid., 1: 48,50-51. 32 Landtman, Origin of Inequality, chap. 5. Mair, Primitive Government, chap. 3.

75

WHOLLY INTERCHANGEABLE

SOCIETY

it with other cases, obtain more exact measures for all the variables concerned. Before making that attempt, we should elaborate the other polar types of society and of constitutional arrangements.

76

THREE

Factionally Divided Society Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier

we were able to say about voting, majority rule, and the use of the lot in wholly interchangeable society, we must now recall, was said with one important reservation: that it would hold only in the absence of large and permanent factions. We cannot leave matters at this. Societies with such factions exist. It is important for us to see why (i.e., for what rational reasons) they might exist; to specify the conditions most conducive to their rise; and to say what constitutional arrangements, if any, could be legitimate in their presence. We shall deal specifically with the following main questions: 1. Under what conditions, if any, is factional behavior rational in a wholly interchangeable society? 2. What determines the degree of loyalty of the members of a faction? 3. What constitutional arrangements can be seen as legitimate by members of factionally divided but wholly interchangeable societies? 4. What will determine the pattern of authority (i.e., what will be seen as legitimate) within such factions? I want to take up each of these questions in order; and again, after the theoretical discussion, to turn to illustrative examples of history. EVERYTHING

CONDITIONS FOR FACTIONAL BEHAVIOR

It has often been thought that long-term factions cannot be rational, or that they can only be rational when they

77

FACTIONALLY D I V I D E D

SOCIETY

include very limited numbers of people.1 There are very good theoretical reasons for this belief, as the following demonstration will show; but the argument has one decisive fault. Consider a wholly interchangeable society consisting of only three persons, A, B, and C, and assume that this society legislates and adjudicates by majority vote. Then if each of the three is equally likely to vote "yea" or "nay" on any given proposal (p=.5), then in the absence of factions their respective probabilities of unique determination will be A B C (1) .33 .33 .33, as has already been demonstrated in Appendix 1.1. Suppose, however, that A and B agree to form a faction: they will always consult before a vote and cast their votes together; if they agree in support of a proposal, both will cast their votes in favor; if either disapproves, both will vote against. In this case the probabilities of unique determination will of course be radically altered, to2 A B C (2) .42 .42 .17. Yet under our original assumptions, this seems unlikely to happen; for Cs obvious response is to "buy away" one of the 1

This is an implication, for example, of Mancur Olson, Jr.'s, The Logic of Collective Action (New York: Schocken, paperback, 1968), esp. chapters 4 and 5. 2 A member of a dominant coalition is certain of defeating any measure he opposes and certain of passing what he introduces if his partner approves it. Hence his probability of unique determination is

(1/3) (.5) + 2(1/3) (.5)* [ ( J ) (1) + ( J ) (1/2)] = 1/4 + 1/6 = 5/12. The member excluded from the coalition would be able to carry one of his proposals only if both the dominant members agreed to it, and to defeat a proposal made by one of the dominant members only if his partner disapproved of it; hence C(D01) = (1/3) (.5)2 + 2(1/3) (.5) (.5) (.5) = 1/12+ 1/12= 1/6.

78

FACTIONALLY D I V I D E D

SOCIETY

members of the faction, as in situation (3) below. To this, the betrayed member of the original faction could be expected to respond as in (4), and so on.3 (3) (4)

A .17 .42

B A2+B

.17

C .42—e .42

The overall result of this sequence must approximate the original distribution of probabilities, so that it would seem that rational members of such a society would not waste their time on faction-building. Yet in reality they sometimes do. Why? Consider again the situation of A and B at situation (2). Clearly, they then have a good thing; and, just as obviously, each of them will be tempted to put private advantage ahead of factional advantage at every stage: each will be tempted to "sell out" to C for some good price, just as Rousseau's hunter was tempted to choose the hare over the stag. It is in the long-term advantage of both A and B not to betray each other; it is in the 3 There are of course von Neumann-Morgenstern (and other) solutions to games of this kind, but they do not avoid the fundamental difficulty dealt with here. In the analysis of von Neumann and Morgenstern, for example, a "solution" is defined as any set of imputations (i.e., schedules of pay-offs) such that (a) no imputation in the set is dominated by any other imputation in the set, and (b) any imputation not in the set is dominated by one in the set. As von Neumann and Morgenstern demonstrated, single-element solutions exist only for games in which all pay-offs are zero, i.e., for "inessential" games; and it is equally evident that a solution in their sense may consist of an infinity of elements—e.g., in the present case the set of all imputations in which C received a probability of exactly .17 would constitute a solution, but the number of such possible imputations is of course infinite. Hence the conclusion of von Neumann and Morgenstern that any given solution, to work in fact, must be "accepted" by the players as the only "sound" set of pay-offs in some social sense. The task here is to examine the ways in which such social attitudes can arise and be reinforced. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1944), sees. 30.1, 30.2, and 31.2.3.

79

FACTIONALLY

DIVIDED

SOCIETY

short-term advantage of each to do so. How can they keep their eyes on the long-term advantage? The easiest answer is for A and B to establish some "en­ forcement" mechanism to guarantee each other's good faith. They might contract, for example, with some outside agency, or with government (if its constitutional arrangements permit such a contract), to enforce heavy penalties for abandoning the faction. In the absence of such "civilized" methods of enforcement, A and B might trade hostages or damaging evidence about each other. Clearly A and B would gain a great deal from this arrange­ ment in so small a group. But at least in absolute terms, the temptation to coalesce diminishes rapidly with the size of the society. For any large group of N members the probability of unique determination for the average individual in a mini­ mum dominant coalition (just in excess of 50 percent) would be approximated by 4 (.5) + ( . 5 ) ( . 5 ) ( 2 / 3 )

4/3

N/2 N Since the average c(D01) in the absence of faction is of course 1/Λ/, the absolute advantage of forming a dominant faction is given by 4/3 N

1

1/3

N~ N

4

We are dealing here with the summed individual probabilities for the faction as a whole. The odds are .5 that a member of the coalition will be called upon to propose a measure, and it is certain that if he proposes it with the backing of the faction it will pass. The odds are of course also .5 that a non-member will introduce a measure instead; if this is the case, the odds are .5 that the coalition will oppose it. If they oppose it, it is certain to be defeated; and since, on average, about half of the votes outside the coalition will also be cast against a proposal, the probability that one of the coalition's votes was decisive is 1/2 = 2/3. 1/2+ 1/4 80

FACTIONALLY D I V I D E D

SOCIETY

and it is clear that this value becomes infinitesimal as N becomes very large. Thus in the absence of any complicating factors, the benefit of a faction declines with increasing size of the total group; and if we assume that, after some point, the costs of the enforcement mechanism must increase roughly in proportion with the number of members, then there will obviously come a time when the marginal cost must outweigh the marginal benefit and factional behavior will be abandoned. It is reasonable to assume fairly constant marginal costs in normal circumstances. The task even of parliamentary whips increases as the number of members increases, and it quickly becomes very difficult to know even who all the members of the group are, let alone how they vote.5 But circumstances are not always normal, and it must be the hope of eager faction-builders to make them less so. How, they will ask, can an enforcement system be made at least cheaper (so that larger groups can be accommodated) or—best of all—be made to have no marginal cost for additional members at all? The problem is to identify members in ways that make it difficult for them to defect without being noticed. Ordinarily this is accomplished, if it is done at all, only by knowledge of the member's face, voice, or (in roll-calls) name. But the process can be radically cheapened by making each member easier to identify: specifically, by giving him some badge of membership—a uniform, a lapel pin, a shirt of a special color or hair of a certain length; members would be punished for failure to wear their insignia, for alterations in the appropriate hair style, or for conduct otherwise unbecoming their membership. 5 Before the introduction of recorded teller votes in the U.S. House of Representatives, volunteer groups occasionally attempted to record these divisions from the galleries. The chore was difficult, and perhaps impossible: I have heard it asserted by knowledgeable people that even the official lists of House of Commons divisions contain many errors.

81

FACTIONALLY

DIVIDED SOCIETY

As an alternative to this style of factional enforcement, members can try to bar even the thought of disloyalty, so that social contacts with the opposition, the hearing of their arguments, or even the frequenting of their areas of residence, may all be quite rationally proscribed. These devices are cheaper, if only because they are en­ forced by community pressure;6 but there would appear even with them to be a limit to the size of group that could success­ fully maintain a faction.7 The ideal would be something else again: a badge that could not be removed. If this could be found, there would obviously be no cost at all in "forcing" people to keep wearing it; and the marginal cost of observing an additional member would be as close to zero as one could hope to come.8 We have already given a name to this kind of badge in Chapter Two: stigmata, by which were meant precisely those human characteristics that have low costs of identification and high costs of conversion.9 Hence it should be among stig­ matized groups that coalitions will form most easily; they β Accessibility to such pressure appears to be a strong determinant of factional voting. In Germany, for example, of Catholic (CDU) voters who live in homogeneous Catholic areas, 14 percent express a willingness to consider voting SPD; of those who live in predomi­ nantly SPD areas, 66 percent express such a willingness. The national average among CDU voters on this question was 39 percent. Klaus Liepelt and Alexander Mitscherlich, Thesen zur Wahlerfluktuation (Frankfurt am Main: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), p. 102, p. 109. 7 Jiirg Steiner, in an important essay, puts forward the same hy­ pothesis on rather different reasoning: namely, that factional loyalties are better defused and "proportional" solutions more likely in small systems than in large ones. "Majorz und Proporz," Politische Vierteljahresschrift 11 (1970): 141. 8 An alternative method, at least among revolutionary movements, is to let the existing regime take over the costs of identification: that is, each member of the conspiracy deliberately commits a crime so severe that he can never return to normal society, thus insuring his continued loyalty to the faction. Cf. Bob Matorin, review of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, by Thomas Powers, The Phoenix (Bos­ ton), 22 June 1971, p. 14. 9 See above, p. 71.

82

FACTIONALLY D I V I D E D

SOCIETY

should be able to form even in very large societies; and the higher their costs of conversion, the easier the formation should be. This much tells us, if our assumptions are right, that factional behavior would be rationally possible even in very large, wholly interchangeable societies, provided that stigmata were present. Yet we have shown neither that stigmata are sufficient nor that they are necessary for such behavior. Nor have we eliminated other possible determinants of the existence and strength of factional ties. DETERMINANTS OF FACTIONAL LOYALTY

If we return to the point in the section just preceding where we examined the hypothetical faction as it would be without any mechanism to enforce loyalty, we see a clear example of the Rousseauean hare-and-stag problem: the immediate and individual interest is best served by defection from the "hunting party" that is the faction; the long-term and group interest is best served by loyalty to it. This is the general set of problems to whose discussion Professor Mancur Olson, Jr., has contributed much.10 As is by now well known, he comes to the conclusion that, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, rational men will not (at least in large groups) support collective actions of any kind, including the sort of faction-formation we have been examining. This conclusion is, I think, more than a strict application of rationalist assumptions will bear, as can be seen from a closer study of Olson's own exposition.11 For our present purposes, however, a somewhat different notation seems more useful, which allows for a consideration of the effect of probability estimates by the actors concerned. 10

See above, n. 1. This is done in detail in my joint essay with Lois Wasserspring, Does Political Modernization Exist? Corporatism in Old and New Societies (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Professional Papers, 1971), pp. 22-25. 11

83

FACTIONALLY DIVIDED SOCIETY

Let us consider a member of a dominant faction in a situation analogous to (2) in our original exposition; that is, A .42

(2)

B

C .42

.17.

Let us try to state the conditions under which the member will remain loyal to the faction. We have assumed first of all that the enforcement mecha­ nisms of the faction cost something, and that our individual pays a share of the cost. This share we will designate as A, and for some von Neumann-Morgenstern mapping w let a=w(A).12 We assume also that the faction, if successfully continued, will give the member a net increase in utility over the long-term non-coalition situation: we will denote this net increase as Du and again let Ui=W(D1). But these rewards will accrue only if the coalition is successful, and this proba­ bility we shall denote p„ so that pcd\ will represent the ex­ pectation value of the faction. Now our individual has an alternative: he may defect from the faction. This may bring him certain short-term rewards, as we have seen; and his valuation of these we will denote D1, so that O2=W(Dz). His defection will, however, if de­ tected, also carry the penalties of the enforcement mechanism (such as ostracism, harassment, even personal pain or death): the member's valuation of these costs we will denote as C, with c=w(C); and his estimate of the probability that his defection would actually be detected and punished will be represented as pd so that his estimated costs of conversion out of the faction will be pdc. If he is not detected, however, he will continue to enjoy the benefits of the faction even after his defection, provided that his is not the decisive vote in defeating the faction. Hence we can state the condition for continued loyalty to the faction as follows: a 12