Politics

Conceptual Overview

Over the past 60 years or so, there has been noteworthy work done by scholars who have attempted to establish scientific theories of politics along the lines of—or perhaps simply as versions of—economic theory. The [Page 1252]earliest, and still perhaps the greatest, major result in the field was derived by Kenneth Arrow in 1951 in his Social Choice and Individual Values. Arrow's Possibility Theorem (more often called the Impossibility Theorem) was a demonstration that, given certain apparently reasonable assumptions about preferences and voting, it was impossible to avoid collective irrationality in the form of cycles in which the electorate prefers A to B and B to C, but also prefers A to C. A large body of work in the subfield of economics and political science known as social choice responds to and refines Arrow's theorem. Duncan Black, in 1958, independently arrived at a conclusion similar to Arrow's in A Theory of Committees, which showed that the irrationality of cycling did not occur in an electorate with “single-peaked” preferences such that all voters' choices can be arrayed along one dimension, such as a liberal-conservative political spectrum. Amartya Sen extended the Impossibility Theorem in his 1982 scenario of the “Lewd and the Prude” to demonstrate an incompatibility between political liberalism in the sense of allowing some domain of individual choice and the economic standard of Pareto optimality. In the same year, William Riker served as a bridge between Arrow's austere economics and empirical political science by arguing that irrational cycles were important in practice as well as in theory, and that Arrow's theorem rightly understood supported representative democracy over populist or plebiscitary democracy.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a negative or critical model rather than an affirmative one such as Ricardo's comparative advantage model. Though the work of Ricardo and Adam Smith provided the basis for an economic science that took a basically optimistic stance toward economic exchange, the work of Arrow and those who have extended the Impossibility Theorem does not provide the basis for a similarly optimistic view of democratic politics. Neither does the work of James Buchanan, an economist and political theorist who, like Arrow and Sen, has received a Nobel Prize. In the 1962 The Calculus of Consent, as well as in other works, Buchanan, along with Tullock, has worked on the premise that political arrangements can be understood as ways to maximize benefits from contracts. But instead of using that method to argue that majoritarian democratic voting is analogous to economic exchange and produces similar benefits, Buchanan argued that unanimously agreed-to constitutions restricting the power of the majority, not elections with competing parties, are analogous to markets. Buchanan's work is thus like Arrow's in having skeptical or critical rather than affirmative implications for competitive democratic politics. Another significant work in the skeptical vein was Dahl's 1956 A Preface to Democratic Theory, which combined criticism of the efficacy of James Madison's institutional protections for minorities with questioning of whether it was possible to design a system that correctly weighed the intensity of preferences held by voters. On the same theme, Kendall and Carey in 1968 were more favorable toward Madison, but did not differ essentially from Dahl in their skepticism about the ability of democratic voting to weigh intensity.

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