Heresthetics

Heresthetics is a term invented by W. H. Riker to explain how societies can radically change direction with new states of stable coalitions. He says heresthetics is the art of manipulation and is the fourth element of the class of the arts of language alongside the three defined in ancient Greece: logic is concerned with validity; grammar with communication-value; rhetoric with persuasion; and heresthetics with the strategy-value of sentences.

In his book Liberalism Against Populism, Riker uses Arrow's theorem to demonstrate that different choice procedures can lead to different outcomes despite identical preferences among people. Riker argues, using May's theorem, that only the simple majority rule with two alternatives can meet reasonable normative standards for decision making. Furthermore, two generalizations of Arrow's theorem provide problems for democratic theory. First, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that all voting systems are “manipulable”; that is, through agenda setting and strategic voting, democratic outcomes can be driven by subsets of voters. This means we cannot be sure that any result represents the true opinions of the people. The McKelvey-Schofield chaos theorem shows that if issue space is multidimensional, then any bundle of policies can beat any other bundle in a pairwise vote. This theorem was thought by Riker to show that politics was essentially chaotic and any result we reach is merely contingent. He concludes that democratic society's social choices are unordered, inconsistent, and arbitrary. These conclusions lead to a type of skepticism about the normative worth of democracy: not that democracy is a sham, but the belief that the results of a democratic decision are the true “will of the people” is a sham.

[Page 317]One problem that emerges for the chaos theorem is that political life appears more stable than it should. If any bundle of policies can beat any other in multidimensional issues, how is it that as soon as one party gains power, another does not come up with a bundle of policies that beats the first and so is able to take over at the next election? Or even why as soon as one party announces its policies, another announces a winning set, merely for the first to announce a set that beats that one? There are many potential answers, including the transactions costs of such a process and institutional constraints on such rapid transfers of policy commitments. However, another, more interesting answer is that people just do not think in multidimensional issue space. We simply cannot think about what our views are in many different dimensions at a time. Rather, we tend to think in single-dimension (left-right) ideological space, or perhaps (as empirical analysis suggests) we can handle two-dimensional issue space but not more. In one or two dimensions, together with reasonable assumptions about the structure of individual preferences, stability can be assumed. This is shown by Duncan Black's median voter theorem.

We are now in a position to explain Riker's views of heresthetic politicians. His idea is that astute politicians can manipulate the agenda through their speeches so that the stable outcomes that emerge in one-dimensional ideological space can be shifted such that a new coalition emerges. Politicians do this by manipulating the dimensionality of issue space by bringing to the fore new issues or describing issues in subtly new ways that bring forth new preferences that split previous coalitions and force new ones together. He argues his case through a series of examples, his most prominent one being the emergence and reemergence of slavery as an issue in U.S. national politics between 1787 and 1860. He suggests that from 1787 a dominant Jefferson-Jackson coalition dominated U.S. politics, and although the slavery issue arose many times, it did not become dominant until the supreme heresthetician Abraham Lincoln manipulated the issue to create a new coalition. In his book The Art of Political Manipulation, Riker illustrates his claims historically, with a series of stories from Pliny the Younger to Abraham Lincoln and other examples through to the 1950s.

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