I'm going to present 2 games coupled together which seem to capture American politics. I don't think any of this is new or innovative, it just weaves together theories and models into a single tapestry described by 2 games. This post will just present a "big picture" of what's going on and what my interests are as far as topics which I'll be writing about in the future.
The two games are the election game and the legislation game, or "Getting to Congress" and "What do I do here in Congress?" I will give conceptual explanations for the games involved, not writing down any formal rules. Since the 2020 election is on everyone's mind, I will give more detail to the election game than to the legislation game.
Election Game
The first game is the Election Game, which involves candidates trying to "persuade" voters to cast their ballot for them. So we have at least two "types" of players in this game: candidates and voters, ostensibly they interact, the candidates can see (after the fact) how each other interact with voters (e.g, hold rallies, give stump speeches), and the voter's cast their ballots on Election Day. Whoever gets the most votes wins the election.
For the sake of simplicity, the only election games I will be considering will involve legislators and the Presidency, held every 2 years (so the Presidency is involved only "every other" time the election game is played). Again we can refine this to distinguish House members running for election from Senators running for election, and further involve the Governorship races as well as state legislator races. But for simplicity, we start small then successively refine the game.
Refining the Game
We can refine this game arbitrarily much, adding new player types ("party elites" which fund the candidates, recruit them, etc.; "activists" which operate the "Get Out The Vote" [GOTV] efforts, which form the pool of recruits for party candidates; etc.). This involves modeling political ambition, to some degree.
We can also consider further intragame aspects. For example, we can imagine in a state, two factions vying for power among the political elites within the same party. This was what happened, e.g., nationwide in 2010 with the Tea Party. Coalition management becomes an issue if we take factions seriously.
But we can also consider inter-game aspects. Senator Mark Hanna [wikipedia] (R-OH) who was able to control the party machinery for Southern Republican parties, ostensibly he would be both a candidate and a "party elite", though in different states. As Edmund Morris put it in Theodore Rex (pp.38–39)1 For more on this, see Horace and Marion Merrill The Republican Command: 1897–1913 (1971) pp.74–75 for Hanna's politicking in the 1900 national convention which secured his position a kingmaker with Southern delegates, and Richard Sherman's The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to Hoover, 1896-1933 (1971) pp.19–20. Herbert David Croly's Marcus Alanzo Hanna: His Life and Work (1912) pg.298
The South was Hanna's chief source of political strength. No matter that he himself represented Ohio. No matter either that the Republican Party in Dixie was so weak that in some state legislatures it had no seats at all. What did matter was that the South was disproportionately rich in delegates to national conventions. Hanna's expert cultivation of these delegates, and his control of party funds as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, had guaranteed the two nominations of William McKinley. In his other role, as Senator in charge of White House patronage, he had been a rewarding boss, showering offices and stipends upon the faithful. As long as the South continued to send delegations of these blacks north every four years, Mark Hanna would remain a party kingmaker.
We could also consider the situation where we want to model political ambition: several members of the House want "bigger positions". The governorship and a senate seat both have opened up. Each of these legislators have to weigh their own ambitions against the likelihood one of their opponents would win the seat.
Voters
The voters appear to be irrational actors. Or, at least, that's what Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes have found in their book The American Voter (1960). This doesn't mean we cannot model them. It just means how they determine their vote is not by a utility function.
We can take the converse perspective, and try to model voters as rational, but this opens up a huge can of worms (as far as modeling is concerned). How do we determine their utility function?
If James Carville is right, and voters determine who to vote for based on "It's the economy, stupid", then we need to model the economy. I posit economists are incapable of this (see, e.g., Hill and Myatt's The Economics Anti-Textbook or Keen's Debunking Economics for details) and more importantly this would be too distracting from the bigger issue modeling how voters choose who to vote for.
We could try to model the utility functions as exogenous quantities (i.e., not explained by the model, but just supplied by empirical observation or statistical modeling). But this feels underwhelming, and not better than just using statistics ab initio when modeling voter behavior.
My personal belief is that, it is plausible legislators are rational actors (in the game theoretic sense) because they are foist into an unnatural situation (being forced to run for re-election every so often). But voters are not constrained in such a manner. There is no compelling reason to believe voters would behave any differently voting than doing anything else, in which case voters are swayed by the cognitive biases we all experience.
Party Elites
This is a very sinister name for a lackluster type of player in the games. Once upon a time, we could imagine these players as the cigar chomping bosses picking candidates in smoke-filled rooms. But since the McGovern-Fraser reforms of 1972, the cigar chomping bosses have lost their power gradually over the past half century or so.
The "party elites" refers to the boring bureaucrat who has to decide "how to divide the dollar" among candidates they want to endorse, and who to encourage to run for office. Anyone can become a "party elite" in this brave new post-McGovern-Fraser world.
The goal for party elites is to recruit and back candidates who will implement policies the elites desire. This is simple enough, until we start modeling ideology (think: Tea Party versus Establishment Republicans; Progressives versus Establishment Democrats). Then Party Elites contend over the party machinery, in some appropriate sense, responsible for dispensing funds to candidates and recruitment.
In some sense, there is indirect communication between voters and party elites mediated through elections. This would impact which faction among party elites has "power", i.e., greater say in how to allot funds and who to endorse or recruit.
Legislation Game
Once elected, legislators need to play the Legislation Game of introducing bills, trying either to block or to pass them, all before the next election. We can refine this game in quite a few ways, but first perhaps we should clarify terminology.
At the federal level, Congress works in Sessions or 2-year intervals to introduce bills, work on them, and pass them. That's the name of the game: passing (or blocking) legislation. We can view this as a "repeated spatial voting game" coupled to a few other games (Chicken, Divide the Dollar, etc.). Our interests is specifically modeling contemporary legislation, not producing some dynamical system which explains how we got from 1789 to here.2 A historic note: we take for granted bills are identified by one of a half-dozen standard types [e.g., HR, S, SRes, etc.] and a number and the congress number. This didn't start until the 14th Congress, according to the data provided by the Library of Congress. Before then, it is difficult to determine the bill numbers, and seemingly post hoc to assign any identification to those early bills. Eugene Nabors's Legislative Reference Checklist: The Key to Legislative Histories from 1789-1903 is a blessing to researchers, even today, since that patient scholar went through the early bills and assigned numbers to them, and identified bills with the resulting statutes.
Even in its simplest form, the origins of bills is rather elusive. Just like voter preferences, we could model it as exogenous and not worry about "where bills come from": it comes from us, by hand! Or we could model it endogenously, there is some mechanism within the model responsible for legislators creating a bill. But without modeling bill drafting at all, well, why on Earth would legislators meet?
Assuming, somehow, legislators draft and introduce bills, we are confronted with the degree of realism we want to approximate. Bills are assigned to committees. The committees may or may not even schedule hearings for the bills, depending on the attitude of the committee chair. Assuming the committee holds hearings and eventually approves it, the committee (usually) files a report detailing their findings, and the bill is either referred to more committees or the chamber's presiding officer (like the committee chair) may or may not schedule time for debate. There are mechanisms to force a bill to a vote, but again that's rather complicated.
We can refine this legislation game, extending its core concept to incorporate strategic voting (voting against one's interest to feign interest in something else), amendments, include a new type of player ("lobbyists") which could make the legislator's dynamics with party elites more intriguing. I need to research this area more before committing myself to anything, I'm not even sure there are adequate game theoretic models of lobbyists.
Further, presumably legislator behavior changes relative to when they are up for election next. A senator can play the legislation game thrice before playing the election game, whereas all members of the House must alternate between the election game and the legislation game. Does this impact behavior for House members compared to Senators? Do their utility functions change if they change chambers?
Concluding Remarks
I've only outlined the two "subgames" in American politics relevant to elections, but have not described how they are coupled together. Presumably voters care about what their representatives do, which guides the utility functions for the legislation game. Presumably party elites care if their elected candidates are faithfully implementing the policies promised. The interactions between legislating and elections need to be further explored (or explored at all).
We also have not discussed the other branches of government. Presumably we could model the President as a 1-person chamber (that's what veto power allows the President to do, after all) which can draft legislation for the other chambers (it's what the White House Office of Legislative Affairs does and has done since Eisenhower created it). Presumably budget considerations could be modeled, since the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 specified the Executive branch needs to propose the budget.
I'm hesitant about modeling the Judicial branch, however. In practice, two lawyers try to persuade a judge. That's what a Court Case is. But the means by which persuasion is accomplished is decidedly not a "game" (it cannot be accurately modeled using game theory). Further, the Judicial branch interprets laws which the Legislature has passed and enacted, which is hard to model. We could handle a case-by-case (sorry for the pun) modeling philosophy, but there is no elegant "one size fits all" model as for the legislature above.
I also want to warn against trying to transform the model presented here into a "unified theory of Congress", since there's still quite a bit exogenous to the model. Laws are proposed to respond to prevailing problems and conditions, which are not modeled within this "coupled game". Although this model proposed may "tie together" various disparate games strewn throughout the literature, providing a more cohesive and appealing model, it is not the "unified theory" you are probably hoping for (beyond explaining legislator behaviour given exogenously observed bills and perturbations).
But we have, I think, successfully integrated a number of theories and models into one coherent model. We have woven together political ambition, spatial voting, election campaign behavior, and power dynamics at various levels. Ostensibly this could be extended to include state legislatures, governorships, as well as the Presidency. But we only have a hand wavy description of the games, we don't actually have a proof that "When restricted to x, we recover the political ambition game" (or any similar such proposition). This would be interesting to pursue, perhaps.
What I am interested in, however, is whether we could provide conditions describing "party systems", i.e., periodic shifts and realignments in the ideology of the parties. If so, how long does a party system last? Under what conditions will a party realignment happen? Can they be avoided? How long does a realignment take? Can this be empirically tested?
References
- John S. Jackson, The American Party System: Continuity and Change over Ten Presidential Elections. Brookings Institute Press, 2015.
Voters
- Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, The American Voter. Unabridged edition. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
- Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter. Harvard University Press, 1996.
- V.O. Key, The Responsible Electorate. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.
- Peter F. Nardulli, Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era: A Reexamination of Electoral Accountability in the United States, 1828-2000. Princeton University Press, 2005.
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