grecu, razvan - party competition in central and eastern europe (teza doctorat)

8/3/2019 GRECU, Razvan - Party Competition in Central and Eastern Europe (Teza Doctorat)

1/221

NATIONAL SCHOOL OF POLITICAL AND

ADMINISTRATIVE STUDIES

FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

DOCTORAL THESIS

PARTY COMPETITION IN CENTRAL AND

EASTERN EUROPE: THE CZECH REPUBLIC,

HUNGARY, POLAND AND ROMANIA

SUPERVISOR:

PROFESSOR DR.

ADRIAN MIROIU

PhD STUDENT:

RZVAN GRECU

BUCHAREST, 2008


2/221

2

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4CHAPTER 1:INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................. 6

1.1. Party Competition in Uncertain Environments ....................................................... 61.2. Parties, Policies and Democracy ........................................................................... 121.3. The Organization of the Thesis ............................................................................. 16

CHAPTER 2:THE ECONOMIC BASES OF POLITICS: A PRELIMINARY VIEW......................... 17

2.1. The Study of the Political Economy...................................................................... 172.2. The Methodological Individualism and the Theory of Choice.............................. 21

2.3. Rationality and Rational Behaviour ...................................................................... 252.4. Rational Politicians and Political Action............................................................... 302.5. Two Views on Political Competition: Sociological and Economic Models ......... 332.6. How the Voters Decide?........................................................................................ 452.7. A Crude Model of Party Competition with Downsean Parties and Voters ........... 472.8. Summery................................................................................................................ 50

CHAPTER 3:ECONOMIC APPROACHES TO THE THEORY OF PARTY COMPETITION......... 53

3.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 533.2. The Voting Paradox as a Puzzle for the Democratic Theory ................................ 543.3. The Basic Concepts of Spatial Analysis of Politics .............................................. 58

3.4. The Classical Spatial Models of Party Competition.............................................. 603.5. Variations of Unidimensional Spatial Party Competition and Voting: Critiques ofClassical Models and MVT.......................................................................................... 693.6. Multidimensional Voting: The Power of Mean Positions..................................... 843.7. Competition in Multiparty Format ........................................................................ 883.8. Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 91

CHAPTER 4:INFORMATION AND ENTRY AS DETERMINANTS OF PARTY COMPETITION 93

4.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 934.2. The Models ............................................................................................................ 944.3. The Implications of the Models: How Information and Institutions Shape

Electoral Competition in Multiparty Settings?...........................................................102CHAPTER 5:HYPOTHESES, METHODOLOGY AND DATA........................................................107

5.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1075.2. Rebuilding the Ship at Sea: Party System and Political Parties in NewDemocracies of CEE .................................................................................................. 1095.3. The Strategy of Research: The Empirical Hypotheses........................................1195.4. The Data Sources and Data Analysis .................................................................. 121


3/221

3

CHAPTER 6:AN OUTLINE OF THE CZECH, HUNGARIAN, POLISH AND ROMANIAN PARTYSYSTEMS ...................................................................................................................... 136

6.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1366.2. Parties and Party System in the Czech Republic.................................................138

6.3. Parties and Party System in Hungary .................................................................. 1406.4. Parties and Party System in Poland.....................................................................1436.5. Parties and Party System in Romania..................................................................1456.6. Concluding Remarks ........................................................................................... 150

CHAPTER 7:PARTY COMPETITION IN THE CEE: IDEOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE ANDCENTRIPETAL COMPETITION ................................................................................. 151

7.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1517.2. Institutional Barriers for Entry in the CEE..........................................................1537.3. On the Position of Median Voter in the CEE Elections ...................................... 1607.4. Ideological Convergence and Centripetal Competition in Competitive Elections:Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania in Comparative Perspective ......... 1657.5. Discussion............................................................................................................185

CHAPTER 8:CONCLUSIONS: IMPLICATIONS OF ELECTORAL COMPETITION IN THE CEE........................................................................................................................................187

8.1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1878.2. The Implications of Centripetal Competition for the CEE Democracies............1898.3. The Implication of Results for Political Competition ......................................... 1928.4. The Implication for Political Representation.......................................................1948.5. Final Remarks:.....................................................................................................197

APPENDIX .................................................................................................................... 199Appendix 1:Formal proof of Wittmans alternative competitive model (Chapter 3, Section 3.5.4)....................................................................................................................................199Appendix 2:Formal proof of Davis and Hinich (1968) (see the Chapter 3, Section 3.6)...............201Appendix 3:Party Manifestos Coding Scheme .............................................................................. 202

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................213


4/221

4

Acknowledgements

During the academic process that led to this thesis, I have been intellectually influenced by

many reputable scholars to whom I owe a great part of my academic achievements. First, I

have to thank Professor Adrian Miroiu who has been over these four years an invaluable

source of academic mentorship. Not only that Professor Miroiu kindly accepted to

supervise a thesis on a topic (party politics) not very relevant for his main academic

interests, but he also provided me with theoretical guidance in probably the most crucial

part of the doctoral studies: the beginning. I largely owe him the theoretical instrument and

the analytical reasoning of this thesis and I personally benefited a lot from the countless

discussions we have had during the years about rational choice theory, social choice theory

or spatial models of party competition. This thesis represents a small tribute I pay for

Professor Miroius efforts to promote rational choice theory among academic disciplines in

the Romanian political science departments.

I also particularly thank Professor Stephen Whitefield who offered me invaluable

supervision during and after my research fellowship at University of Oxford. He patiently

accepted my stubborn rational choice reasoning which often clashed with his sociological

arguments and guided my empirical research, very often raising questions that helped me toclarify the entire argument of the thesis. His comments and suggestions have significantly

shaped the logic of the thesis in many respects and gave me the necessary energy to

reformulate and clarify the argument even when I was almost fed up with the entire thesis.

Also, this thesis would not have been the same (in the good parts) without the weekly

discussions we had in his office at University of Oxford and during the seminar of CEE

politics Professor Whitefield organized in the Spring of 2006.

Special thanks are due to my good friends, Calvin Mouw and Laurentiu tefan, with

whom I have worked very close in various projects during the last five years. They have

been always very supportive and ready to provide invaluable feedback; both of them have

had a significant influence over my intellectual background for which I have to thank them

publicly. Also, my appreciation goes to the numerous friends I have from The Invisible

College and The Romanian Society of Political Science, including here Liliana Popescu,


5/221

5

Lucian Catrina, Anca Gheau, Aurelian Muntean, Annette Freyberg-Inan, Irina Ionescu,

Arpad Todor and all other persons with whom I spent three wonderful years working for IC

and SRSP.

I need to acknowledge the tremendous help of Professors H.D. Klingemann and

Andrea Volkens who kindly agreed to share with me the manifestos data even before their

seminal book was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Also, Professor Gabor

Toka offered me information about 1994 Hungarian elections which I very much needed. I

thank them all again.

There are also several institutions which have offered me institutional support

during the doctoral studies. The Invisible College and The Civic Education Project,

Romania, offered me valuable logistic and material support at the beginning of my doctoral

studies, for which I thank again Liliana Popescu and Laurentiu tefan. Together with TheAcademic Fellowship Program, these two institutions have significantly contributed to the

development of my professional career in political science. Also, Open Society Institute

and The British Council financed my research PhD fellowship at University of Oxford in

2005-2006.

Above all, I would like to thank from all my heart to three very special persons. I

dedicate this thesis to my parents whom I owe a great education and all these beautiful

years from childhood to adulthood. To my father, particularly, I owe my studies in political

science and to my mother, her steady support for my professional aspirations. I can not

thank enough for how much they have done for me. Last but not least, I need to thank my

wife, Georgiana, who always offered me the moral support and who kindheartedly accepted

my long absences from home caused by the various research fellowships. Words can not

express enough my gratitude and feelings to her.


6/221

6

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

1.1. Party Competition in Uncertain Environments

The development of political parties and party systems has been a favoured topic for the

scholars of political process in the Central and Easter Europe (hereafter CEE). Political

parties have been analysed in various regional contexts, such as the development of party-

voter linkages and voting behaviour, government formation process, stabilization of

national party systems and electorates and so forth. Yet only little systematic attention has

been paid to one of the most interesting political phenomena in the region: the policy

strategies and ideological commitments of political parties in the electoral process.

The thesis focuses on electoral competition in the CEE. There are two fundamental

research questions I address in this thesis. The first is how the political parties compete in

the environment of CEE that is notoriously characterized by high political uncertainty? The

second fundamental question is what are the political consequences of the pattern, if any, of

electoral competition in the region? Concretely, my study explores whether political parties

in the CEE do use centrist or divergent electoral strategies in order to maximize their votes

in national elections. If a pattern of political competition emerges, what can we say about

their causes and political consequences?

Also, there are two fundamental propositions in my thesis. The first argues that

political parties in the CEE make use extensively of convergent ideological strategies in the

national elections and this pattern of competition characterizes both stable (or consolidated)

and unstable (unconsolidated) national party systems. Though the influence of exogenous

factors like the international organizations (EU, IMF and so forth) can not be fully ignored,

my findings point to four main causes of such pattern of electoral party competition: 1) the

desires of political parties to win elections; 2) the political uncertainty that has

characterized the CEE politics during 1990s; 3) the party dependence of resources (mainly

the state funding and media coverage) that come from outside the party organization and


7/221

7

which constrains the political parties in the region to behave as vote-seeking political

actors; and 4) the political institutions that emerge out of the desire of self-interested

political leaders and parties to control the electoral process, such as electoral thresholds and

legislation on public financing.

In what concerns the second fundamental proposition of my research, the thesis

suggests that the self-interested political parties have produced an electoral competition

which may have been responsible at least in part for the success of political democracy in

the region, despite the serious political, social and economic transformations that harmed

our societies during the transition period. However, for the moment, this proposition has a

limited empirical support and the reader should regard it rather as a hypothesis that has to

be farther explored with more suitable research design. Currently, it suffers from the same

problems that are very common in almost all studies of democratization: there are many

key theoretical variables and only limited empirical cases available where we can test their

effects. Since in the thesis I have evidence from only four countries in the region, the Czech

Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania, all successfully democratized countries, I can not

test properly this argument. However, this second proposition that is suggested by the

results the electoral party competition has the potential of being a significant advance in our

understanding of democratization and democratic consolidation.

The thesis has a third, more theoretical argument. The standard approaches to party

competition, particularly the spatial theories, are often blind to the environment and

institutional settings in which the competition takes place. As the literature emphasizes, the

relationship between parties, voters and policies is indeed fundamental for political

competition. Also, the core literature rightly points that institutions influence the political

choice and strategies of political parties and voters. A proportional electoral system, for

instance, encourages political parties to take on more extreme policy positions because they

can obtain parliamentary representation even by speaking to relatively small number of

extremist voters. However, less considered in the literature is that the political parties are

not just political actors that obey political institutions. They can and habitually they do

shape the political institutions so that the institutional system becomes congruent with their

political goals. Consequently, I argue in the following chapters that political parties in the

CEE structure electoral institutions that give them advantage in electoral competition


8/221

8

against the outsiders (or new parties). These electoral institutions play a role in the

convergent strategies of political parties in elections.

The political convergence of political parties in the CEE is a puzzling result. After

all, the major theories of party systems and political competition have implied that the CEE

politics should be a politics of ideological divergence. The sudden end of communist

systems in the region let the new political leaders and voters cope with numerous political,

social, cultural and economical issues, all of them raising opportunities for political and

ideological conflict. Also, the democratic (if any) and the pre-communist history of

countries from the CEE were not particularly encouraging for ideological convergence. Nor

the institutions of the new democracies were favourable factors in this regard since all

countries in the CEE emerged in transition with multiparty systems and with mixed or even

pure PR electoral systems. Furthermore, the result is puzzling because the pattern of party

competition seems to be significantly different than the one taking place in the Western

Europe, where political parties formulate divergent policy platforms to speak to voters.

What can then explain the political convergence in the region?

As in all relationships in social and political science, there is not a single cause but a

set of causes. The Figure 1.1 depicts the theoretical relationships between the four variables

I formulate above and the ideological convergence of parties in the national elections. One

principal cause of party convergence in electoral competition is the desire of leadership and

parties to win the election. This is one of the standard assumptions in the spatial theories of

party competition (see the Chapter 3), but it hardly can explain alone the ideological

dynamics in the CEE elections. Why the political parties in the region should behave as

vote-hunters in elections after all? The argument I advance in the following chapters is that

the features of CEE politics constrain the political parties to behave electorally as vote-

seekers.

First of all, the political parties in the CEE compete, as I shall show in the Chapter

5, in a very uncertain political environment. As suggested by systemic indicators such as

the electoral volatility, political parties in the CEE do not benefit from the constant support

of the electorates. This uncertainty has reduced the capacity of the political parties to

foresee effectively their political support during the 1990s and the danger of being wiped


9/221

9

out from the parliamentary party system has partly determined them to behave as vote-

seekers in elections.

Figure 1.1: Causes of electoral convergence in the Central and Eastern Europe

Other two peculiarities of the CEE politics have been essential in determining

political parties to assume vote-seeking strategies. The second variable is the low

development of party organization in the region which has had significant political

consequences. The political parties have had low party membership that have generated

only very limited political resources. Membership fees have been insufficient for sustaining

the political activities of political parties, which have become dependent of the political

resources coming from outside the party organization. As I argue in the Chapter 5 and the

Chapter 7, these resources have come usually from the state, but under one essential

condition: the political parties have to win offices (generally parliamentary seats) to be

eligible for these allowances. These spoils from the public offices are important resources

for political parties in the CEE. However, in obtaining these resources, the established

political parties have faced the competition of new political parties that have joined the

political competition from time to time. How do they respond to this threat which

Political uncertainty(high electoral volatility)

Political institutions(electoral thresholds, state

funding, other relevantresources)

Scarce internal politicalresources

(low membership)

Political partiesas vote-seekers

Electoralconvergence


10/221

10

endangers their political survival or may give them smaller shares of the political

resources?

Designing institutions that reduce or eliminate the probability of competing with

new political parties (the third variable) has been the typical answer to this question. To

certain extent, these institutions reassure the established political parties that they will

continue having access to key political resources (state funding, access to media). But these

institutions also produce a significant political effect in electoral competition. The standard

argument in the spatial theories of party competition, which was formulated as a critique to

the findings of the classical models, suggested that the political parties diverge in electoral

competition in order to thwart the danger of new entries at the extreme positions (Palfrey

1984, Greenberg and Shepsle 1987). However, as I argue in the Chapter 4, this is not

necessarily the case: the political parties can design institutions that keep new parties out of

competition and prevent them of winning seats against the established political parties.

When the later parties effectively design such institutions and succeed in keeping out new

political parties, the type of electoral competition changes to ideological collusion.

Theoretically, I approach the question of how political parties compete in the CEE

elections by using a rational choice perspective: the spatial theories of party competition.

The rational choice theory provides us with a variety of parsimonious, rigorous and elegant

theories about competition in different political contexts. Such theoretical approach not

only gives us insights about the relevant factors influencing the ideological and policy

competition among political parties, but also it provides us with rigorous theoretically

driven hypotheses that could be tested in various empirical settings. At the same time, this

reach theoretical approach has produced also many conflicting results which determined

many political scientists to question utility of the theory for social and political research

(Green and Shapiro 1994, Stokes 1963). However, by selecting carefully the key

assumptions and variables, the thesis provides support for the claim that rational choice

approach has very much to offer intellectually in the social and political sciences.

Empirically, I confront the hypotheses generated by the rational choice reasoning in

the Chapter 5 with empirical evidence gathered from four countries in the region: the Czech

Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. These four cases offer sufficient empirical

variety to increase the chances that my argument proves incorrect. On the one hand, our


11/221

11

cases differ quite substantially in terms of stability of national party systems and patterns of

political competition. Up-to-date research on party systems in the CEE regularly point to

the fact that the Czech and Hungarian party systems are much more stable and consolidated

than the Polish and Romanian party systems, both in terms of the party alliances,

government coalitions and links between the electorate and political parties. The

competition among political parties is considered to be well-structured (or more

programmatic) in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, on the one hand, and non-

programmatic in Romania on the other hand, some significant differences inside the first

group being noted (Kitschelt et al 1999). The partisan affiliation seems to be much more

developed in the Czech Republic and Hungary than in Poland and Romania. Also the

Hungarian and Czech party systems have been quite stable in terms of party labels, whereas

new political parties have emerged within the Polish and Romanian party systems after

almost each electoral cycle.

On the other hand, there is some variation in what concerns the institutional

framework of these four CEE democracies. Poland and Romania are semi-presidential

republics that may influence political parties ideological and policy cohesion if Juan Linzs

(1994, 1996) argument about the negative role of elected presidents over party systems is

correct. The Czech Republic and Hungary are pure parliamentary regimes, less

personalized in theory than the semi-presidential regimes, and thus more auspicious for

ideologically well-structured party systems. In the first systems, political parties may have

more incentives to behave in elections as vote-seekers given that the party candidates for

presidential office need to obtain the support of the majority of voters.1 Unfortunately, the

cases do not give us much variance in regards to other institutions, such as the electoral

systems. Only Hungary differs in the group, having a mixed three-tier electoral system,

with Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania using sorts of PR electoral systems. However,

pure majoritarian electoral systems are rare and the PR system predominates in the region.

At the same, the fact that most of electoral systems encourage a broad representation of

1 A presidential race may have an impact on the party strategies in parliamentary elections. Given that theparty candidate for presidential office has to win a majority of votes (or at least a plurality at the later stage) ina majority run-off system, it may determine the parties to take on less extreme policy positions which allowthem to negotiate the political support for the second runoff with a larger number of parties. In pureparliamentary systems, parties can focus only on policies which get the support of the largest share of theelectorate, so that the strategies may differ between these two groups of countries.


12/221

12

social interests is a positive aspect for the present research: the party convergence in

election can not be the product of institutional system alone.

1.2. Parties, Policies and Democracy

The study of political parties has been a fruitful venture in political science. Our

understanding of how political parties function as agents of political democracy has grown

constantly during the last hundred years, as far as the study of modern political parties

could be traced back. And yet, in spite of (or perhaps due to) this long period of time, the

party politics has proved to be a very rich area of intellectual research, debates and

confrontation that have allowed the researchers to come across with new ideas that have

further expanded our knowledge about political process.

The agreement about the importance of political parties for modern political

democracies has not been accompanied by an agreement about how we could study

political parties. Far from being a drawback, this has generated a complex and fascinating

set of knowledge about the role of parties in our political systems. Generally, the scholars

of political parties have used two main approaches that are briefly explored in the nextchapter of this thesis. The behaviourist, or sociological approach, focuses on the

relationship between political parties and the social structure, arguing that political parties

are constrained to represent to some extent particular social groups that offer political

support in exchange for policies. The early sociological model (usually called the Chicago

model) emphasized the relationship between political parties and cohesive social groups,

defined in terms of class, religion, ethnicity or other social characteristics. This theoretical

approach has intellectual roots in Lipset and Rokkan (1967) seminal argument about the

role of social conflicts and cleavages for the development of party alignments in the West

European democracies. Later, as the social and economic developments of modern

democracies weakened the group loyalties and cohesion with important consequences for

the structure of party systems, political sociologists developed another explanation that


13/221

13

emphasized the role of party identification for voting behaviour of voters and their links

with established political parties (Dalton: 2002, Campbell et al. 1960).

On the other hand, the economic models see political parties and their leaders as

rational actors who pursue particular political goals and, contrary to sociological models,

enjoy some degree of autonomy in defining these political goals. However, there is a

growing tendency in the last decade to combine these two approaches into unified models

of party choice and party competition, which include both rational choice and sociological

assumptions (Adams, Merrill, and Grofman: 2005). The boundaries between the two

intellectual approaches have significantly faded away during the last decades when the

empirical research have started to incorporate and test simultaneously sociological and

rational choice hypotheses.2

However, for the sake of highlighting the structure of rational

choice reasoning, I shall discuss this strategy of research in the following chapter by

discriminating theoretically between pure sociological models and pure rational choice

arguments.

Precisely fifty years ago, Anthony Downs (1957) published the celebrated An

Economic Theory of Democracy, a truly manifesto of rational choice theory and economic

modelling of party competition. Paradoxically, Downs work was at the same time a major

success and noteworthy failure. A success, on the one hand, because An Economic Theory

of Democracy has been one of the most cited books of the modern political science, whose

primarily merit was to extend the findings of the early social choice theory, particularly the

Duncan Blacks Median Voter Theorem (hereafter MVT), to mass elections and electoral

competition. Downs work has been the central point of what is probably the largest

research program in the history of political science, with hundreds of articles and books

addressing the Downsean model of political competition. However, to certain extent,

Downs enterprise in the research of electoral competition could be regarded as a failure.

For a long period of time his innovative research design for studying political parties has

remained confined to only a small group of researchers, most of who have regarded

themselves as economists rather than political scientists. In fact, the vast number of

scholars of party politics has been divided ever since 1957 into a small group of people who

2 For arguments in favour of combining the two research strategies, see Hechter (1997), Kiser and Hechter(1998).


14/221

14

greatly advanced the Downsean work in the formal theory of political party competition,

and a majority of scholars who, although acknowledging and often praising Downs

contribution, rejected his method of analysis. But, whatever the shortcomings of Downsean

model of political competition and however fashionable is to criticize and even dismiss

Downs work as irrelevant, one thing can hardly be ignored: there is impossible to address

the issue of electoral party competition and the development of political ideologies without

at least referring to the Downsean theoretical framework.

At the heart of the Downsean work has been the relationship between parties, voters

and policies (or ideology). The logic of democratic politics says that political parties make

use extensively of policies and ideology in order to get elected or maintain in power. The

parties in power use the governing mechanisms to implement the policies they promise to

voters during the electoral campaigns to pursue once they get elected. Conversely, the

parties in opposition formulate alternative sets of policies aiming at obtaining the support of

voters. Even though the political parties, once in power, rarely implement the full set of the

policies they announce before and during the electoral campaigns, the proper function of

the political democracy requires a high degree of convergence between the pre- and post-

electoral policies.

What makes however this relationship between parties, policies and voters function

the way it does is the assumption that the voters requirepolicy benefits from politicians in

exchange for their electoral support and that these policy benefits are, to certain degree,

stable over time. Such assumption represents the bases of accountability principle of the

modern democracies which can be formulated in two sentences that have been extensively

researched in political science. The first sentence suggests that the political parties which

do not act responsively, that is they implement different sets of policies than those

advocated before winning the elections, are punished by voters in the subsequent elections

because they proved to be unreliable politically. The second sentence is considered to be

the core element of accountability: the political parties are constrained in advancing

policies by their past record and, in order to remain credible, they need to consider future

policy commitments in the light of the policies they advocated in the past.


15/221

15

Figure 1.2: Voters, parties, and policies: a systemic relationship

The theoretical relationship between voters, parties and policies is depicted in the

Figure 1.2. However, the links between parties, voters, and policies are far less mechanicalthan the Figure 1.2 suggests. Political parties do enjoy a certain degree of autonomy when

choosing what policy platforms are to be presented in elections and voters do not always

punish political parties for behaving unreliably. Two reasons are particularly important in

this regards. First is that politics is full of ambiguities. Politics and particularly party

competition do not usually offer voters choices in environments characterized by perfect

information. The political parties often use abstract notions such as ideology, left, centre

and right, in order to give voters hints about what policies would implement if getting into

power. Only rarely political parties address concrete issues by pointing to what they would

do once they got elected. Thus, voters are quite often let to guess what the concrete policies

of governing parties will be, a fact which is an unfavourable condition for full

accountability of political parties.

The second reason, which relates to the ambiguity of politics and favours political

parties to be less accountable, regards the imperfect information of individual voters. The

voters do not know the positions of political parties on all issues that are relevant to

political competition and they often need to make use of informational shortcuts to

discriminate between policies advocated by political parties. This gives the political parties

a degree of freedom in choosing their political platforms, although they still need to keep in

line with the previous ideological or policy stances in order to maintain their political

credibility.

Voters

Policies

Parties


16/221

16

1.3. The Organization of the Thesis

The thesis proceeds as following. In the Chapter 2, I introduce the basic assumptions of

economic research on party competition, starting with a general argument about the

specificity of the economic method and moving in the later sections to more specific

arguments about the methodological individualism, economic rationality, and how can we

apply these concepts to politics and party competition. The Chapter 3 extensively discusses

the literature on spatial party competition, with regard to equilibrium outcomes in various

political settings. The argument departs from the classical models of party competition

introduced by Hotelling, Black and Downs and moves to more complex models of party

competition: multidimensional models, models with probabilistic voting and models with

imperfect information. It also includes a brief summery of formal models of multiparty

competition under uncertainty which represents the core theoretical elements of the thesis. I

then proceed to discuss in the Chapter 4 about the importance of information and

institutions for political competition, particularly about how the parties react to political

uncertainty. The Chapter 5 argues why analyzing party competition in the CEE from the

point of view of the theoretical framework that I present in the earlier chapters is correct,pointing to the peculiarities of CEE politics. I also advance there three empirical hypotheses

about what pattern of political competition I expect to occur in the CEE elections and I

present the data and the methodology I use in the empirical analysis. The Chapter 6 outlines

the national party systems of the four countries which constitute the empirical universe: the

Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The empirical analysis of party dynamics

in the CEE elections is offered to reader in the Chapter 7, where I show the degree of party

collision in national elections and I offer support for the theoretical arguments presented in

the Chapter 1 to 4. The Chapter 8 presents some possible implication of such pattern of

political competition for the CEE societies and offers the concluding remarks.


17/221

17

CHAPTER 2:

THE ECONOMIC BASES OF POLITICS: A PRELIMINARY VIEW

2.1. The Study of the Political Economy

Collective actors overwhelmingly predominate today in the study of politics. In our

inquiries about social and political phenomena, we learn about class, ethnicity, parties,

social groups, social movements and so forth, as the elementary units of our analytical

approach. Individuals per se are still rare focus in political science despite that other

disciplines from the social sciences (mainly microeconomics and psychology) have made

important steps forward by using the assumptions ofmethodological individualism.

One of the many difficulties our discipline comes across with is that it aims at

explaining macro political processes and it sometimes disregards the micro-foundations of

these political phenomena. By focusing on macro political processes, we usually

concentrate only on the results of causal process, losing very much of the explanatory

power we aim at in political science. Since almost every political phenomenon involves the

actions of individuals, in the sense that interactions between individuals lead to certain

social and political outcomes, we need to formulate and use theories that ask about why

individuals behave the way they do in political contexts. If our aim as scientists is to

explain why certain phenomena occur, then we need to pay considerable more attention to

these micro-foundations that are of crucial importance for political action.3

One discipline in social sciences underwent an important methodological revolution

decades ago. Economics, particularly microeconomics, begun asking about the goals of

entrepreneurs and linked the economic behaviour with their presumed economicmotivations. The economists argued that endogenous and not exogenous factors were the

main determinants of the economic behaviour of firms and they began to pay attention to

the goals of economic agents in competitive markets. In this respect, the concept of

3 By explaining a political phenomenon I understand subsuming this particular political phenomenon to ageneralizing law. See in this respect W. Riker (1990).


18/221

18

revealed preferences of P. Samuelson (1938, 1948), which assumed that the behaviour and

strategies of firms tell something important about their economic goals, represented a

significant step forward in the economic analysis of firm behaviour. Scientifically,

economics has achieved a respectable position within social sciences by using the

methodological individualism and the assumption of intentional behaviour as fundamental

bases of its methodological approach. Even though many of the economic models seem

simplistic or implausible in their assumptions, the capacity of economics to explain has not

been matched yet by any other discipline in social sciences.

That economics represents a model for other disciplines in social sciences is already

a matter largely accepted. Less appealing for other disciplines has been to borrow the

instrument that has allowed the impressive scientific progress in economics: the economic

method. Several arguments have been advanced to deny the usefulness of applying

microeconomics methodology to the study of other social and political phenomena. One

argument contests the possibility that social scientists, other than economists, could

construct any kind ofmodels for social and political interaction. Such refutation is based on

the assumption that social or political interactions are much more complex than pure

economic exchanges as it involves values, prejudices, social norms etc. These are generally

not of great interest in economic theory but they become unavoidable for anthropologists,

sociologists or political scientists. Thus, the complexity of social and political life can not

be encapsulated meaningfully in the parsimonious models that are used in economics and

any attempt of this sort would be irrelevant for understanding real social phenomena.

Another argument against the economic method regards the process that allows

economists to arrive at strong conclusions about economic behaviour. The economists use

extensively deduction and formalization of the argument in their research. The deductive

approach has been usually considered irrelevant for other social sciences for the same

complexity that presumably characterizes the social interactions. Also, another argument

against the use of economic method in social sciences points to its irrelevance for

understanding real social and political phenomena. Economic models are usually highly

formalized and theory-oriented, whereas other disciplines in social sciences are concerned

with facts and empirical phenomena. The main argument of detractors of economic method

suggests that, by using such method, we understand nothing or very little about our


19/221

19

societies or about how real people behave in various political contexts because we tend to

focus on abstract individuals. For instance, Green and Shapiro (1994, 6-7) argue against

rational choice models:

[] We contend that much of the fanfare with which the rational choice

approach has been heralded in political science must be seen as premature

once the question is asked: What has this literature contributed to our

understanding of politics? We do not dispute that theoretical models of

immense and increasing sophistication have been produced by practitioners

of rational choice theory, but in our view the case has yet to be made that

these models have advanced our understanding of how politics works in the

real world. To date, a large proportion of the theoretical conjectures of

rational choice theorists have not been tested empirically. Those tests that

have been undertaken have either failed on their own terns or garnered

theoretical support for propositions that, on reflection, can only be

characterized as banal: they do little more than restate existing knowledge

in rational choice terminology.

Yet, in spite of these presumed drawbacks, the economic method has been

extensively employed in the last decade in other social science disciplines, particularly in

political science. Three reasons were particularly responsible for such academic

colonisation. The first reason is that a many political scientists (together with colleagues

from other disciplines) were dissatisfied with the explanatory capacity of other approaches

and decided to look after available alternatives. Since the reputation of economics among

other disciplines from social science has been unrivalled, it is obvious why the choice of

some scholars has been the economic method.

The second reason why the economic method has been extensively used in political

science in the last decades is the need for theories of political behaviour that are internally

coherent.4

Formalization and rigorous deduction have allowed economics to achieve such

goal. By contrast, many theories in political science are based on scholars intuition and

4 Since our interest lies in political science I leave outside other social disciplines, although the argument isvalid for them too.


20/221

20

lack of an internally coherent argument. Consequently, it is common in political science to

find incomplete theories that leave aside important theoretical variables or specify

incoherent causal mechanisms.

A third and perhaps the most powerful reason is the integration of economics and

political science in what has been called the political economy. For long time these

disciplines were considered separate academic fields since economics was traditionally

concerned with production and use of scarce goods, whereas political science inquired

about distribution of power and authority within the society. Moreover, the academic

segmentation of social sciences also favoured this traditional perspective about economics

and political science, viewed as separate, fully distinctive academic disciplines. However,

the political economists argue convincingly that at least parts of economics and political

science can not be dissociated and they should be considered as an integrated field of study

called the political economy. Political leaders take decisions that affect the economy and

the economic behaviour of firms. At the same time, the economic behaviour of agents and

the evolution of economy have significant political consequences.5

Firms often lobby at

governmental level to obtain changes in legislation; governments often pass legislation

pursuing particular economic goals and so forth. Moreover, economy and politics were not

considered two separate academic disciplines until the 19th century. To break this

symbiosis, the political economists argue, it means to miss a great deal of understanding in

what regards the economic and political process (Alt and Shepsle 1990).

I am largely sympathetic to this argument. There is not any meaningful reason why

we should a priori divide disciplines according to the method of research. To large extent,

this separation of disciplines is a matter of academic convention. However, rather than

using the method to divide arbitrarily the disciplines in social sciences, we should better

pay more attention to the field of studies and observe that different disciplines,

conventionally regarded as autonomous or even independent, have something meaningfully

to say about human behaviour in a particular contexts. Such arbitrary division is less

5 One assumption in voting behaviour is that the shape of economy is an important determinant of the supportfor political parties. Economic voting literature emphasizes that the support for incumbent political partiesvaries as a function of the evolution of the national or personal economy. As the economy improves (ordevelop well), the fortune of the incumbent political party or coalition increases, but when the economicsituation deteriorates the incumbents are punished by the voters. For extensive summaries of economic votingliterature, see Lewis-Beck 1988, Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000, Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000).


21/221

21

common in natural sciences. Take for instance mathematics, physics or astronomy. All

these disciplines use similar methods and instruments to arrive at solid scientific

conclusions, although there are significant differences regarding the objects of study among

these disciplines. Yet, hardly any physicist, mathematician or astronomer would argue

against mathematics as the principal method of research in her field of study.

I will restrain myself embarking on a detailed argumentation in favour of economic

method and how political science would benefit by using it. My argument in favour of the

economic reasoning is rather implicit: I show in this thesis how using a similar argument

could explain the political behaviour of politicians and political parties in the CEE. After

all, the best argument in favour of a method is to show how it can substantially contribute

to the development of our discipline.

2.2. The Methodological Individualism and the Theory of Choice

The typical argument of scholars who support the methodological individualism is that

[]the elementary unit of social life is the individual human action. To explain social

institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the action andinteraction of individuals (Elster 1992). The main assumption is that only individuals act

in social situations and the group decisions, institutions or other social forms that involve

collective behaviour are only indirect results of the decisions and behaviour of individuals.

To explain why a particular decision has been taken within a group, why institutions have

been created to certain way or why an institution behaves the way, it does means to

analyse the decision and behaviour ofindividuals of that group or institution. Groups and

institutions are only abstract entities that do not possess a will of their own. Even when we

are interested in the behaviour of such collective groups, we need to recall that the primary

units of analysis are individuals and individual behaviour.

How an individual acts and what motivates her actions are questions much more

controversial than the conjectures of methodological individualism. Every individual has a

large set of possible actions at her disposal. How then we can explain why she chooses a


22/221

22

particular action out of this large set of alternatives? Elster (1992, 13) offers an explanation

which is based on two filtering mechanism. Constrains of any kind (physical, economic,

psychological or legal) form the first filtering mechanism each individual faces when she

decides about the future course of action. The actions that are not compatible with these

constrains are eliminated as they form the set ofunfeasible alternatives. The actions that are

consistent with constrains form what we usually call theopportunity set.

Suppose that an individual A has to decide about how she is going to spend the

incoming week-end. Obviously, she almost always has several alternatives from which she

may choose. She can decide to rest during the week-end, staying at home. She could also

plan a trip to one of the resorts nearby her town or she could visit another foreign city,

provided that she is rich enough. Imagine that the set of all alternatives at As disposal is

SA={Stay at home; Visit the Carpathians; Visit the Black Sea; Visit Rome; Visit

Buenos Aires; Visit Mars}. However, in this set of alternatives there may be some

options that are not at all feasible. Take for instance the alternative Visit Buenos Aires.

Such alternative is not feasible because presumably the trip needs some prior arrangements

such as booking a flight ticket, hotel room or applying for consular visa. Neither the

alternative Visit Mars is feasible because we do not have sufficient technological

capabilities to transport a person to Mars and back yet. Thus, the feasible set of alternatives

for the personA becomes SF[A]={Stay at home, Visit the Carpathians; Visit the Black Sea;

Visit Rome}.

However, imagine another person B who is less wealthy than A. Then, her set of

feasible action does not include Visit Rome, because she could not afford a trip arranged

in a short period of time. If she is in a state of extreme poverty, then she probably can

afford neither alternatives Visit Carpathians nor Visit Black Sea, and thus her set of

feasible alternatives is SF[B]={Stay at home}, and her course of action will reflect this

alternative.

Understanding the concept of feasible set of alternatives represents an important

step forward, yet it is not enough to explain the behaviour (or choices) of individuals. Just

because we know that the person A does not have as feasible alternatives Visit Buenos

Aires and Visit Mars is not enough to predict what her choice among all alternatives


23/221

23

from the feasible set will be. We need additional criteria to help us understanding why she

chooses a particular action against other alternatives.

These criteria are: 1) the social norms, and 2) the rational choice, both forming the

second filtering mechanism (Elster: 1992, 13). Take for instance the rules that regulate the

urban traffic. Everybody knows that all cars should circulate on the right side of the road

(left on UK or other countries from British Commonwealth), which could be regarded as a

social norm, although it may have received a legal status by state regulation. Or, when a

group of persons steps up and down on staircase, it usually happens that they choose the

right side of staircase to avoid collision. Again, this is a social norm that imposes certain

behaviour to individuals. Their behaviour is mostly spontaneous in the sense that it does not

involve a cost-benefit analysis of the kind I am going to talk later on. Social norms ask us,

for instance, to greet when we enter a room in which there are other persons, because it is

socially expected to behave in this manner. In all these situations, our behaviour reflects not

a choice made consciously by individuals, but an imposed (loosely defined) social norm.

The rational choice deals with other types of actions. Imagine that our hypothetical

individual A has to decide where to go this week-end. We established that her feasible set

of alternatives is given by the set SF[A]={Stay at home; Visit Carpathians; Visit Black Sea;

Visit Rome}. What is going to be her choice over these alternatives? In order to respond to

this question, we obviously need to know something more about what the individual A

generally prefers, otherwise any alternative from this feasible set could be her choice.

Imagine then that we were able somehow to observe that in the last five week-ends our

friend A had visited London, Paris, Wien, Prague and Budapest, although she had had in

her opportunity set the alternatives Stay at home, Visit the Carpathians or Visit the

Black Sea. It is reasonably then to suspect thatA likes very much to travel abroad, perhaps

enjoying very much the cultural and historical sites of the European cities. Thus, it is very

likely that our individualA is going to choose Visit Rome instead of a trip to mountains or

seaside resorts.

The distinction between behaviours induced by social norms and by rational choice

is marked, yet in many situations the distinction could be fuzzy. I argued that cars

circulating only on right side of road is originally a social (and later a legal) norm.

However, let us imagine that each driver has a choice between driving on the left or


24/221

24

respectively on the right side of the road. The driver knows that driving on the left side

would incur a substantial cost that is associated with this alternative of action: the

probability of a car accident is very high. Then her choice of driving on the right side does

not reflect (only) the social norm; in this context it also represents a rational choice.

Our interest lies on the cases when individuals rationally choose an action against

other possible alternatives, so that we totally disregard the choices that are induced from the

existing social norms. The word rationally has here a special meaning to which I will

come back in the next section of the chapter. Of interest for the moment is whether there is

any criterion that could help us understanding why individuals choose some alternatives

against other alternatives. The good news is that such universal criterion exists; the bad

news is that many find it unsatisfactory.

We, as individuals, have passions and desires. Each individual acts because she

aims at fulfilling these passions and desires. Some people prefer to invest time and money

to become billionaires, although they earn in one year enough money to live a luxurious life

for the rest of their days. Others prefer to become professors of political science, earning

less and without any obvious possibility of becoming millionaires at all. Some prefer to pay

hundred thousands of dollars for a painting of Picasso, whereas others would be happy to

buy only an art album and save the rest for other commodities. Some people enjoy dining to

the most expensive restaurants where they can drink a bottle of Champagne wine for

several hundred dollars, whereas others would find lovely to go to the local pub where they

can enjoy the cheap local beer and watch football games. The sequence could continue

endlessly since the behaviours and choices of individuals are very diverse. However, what

brings together all these diverse choices is that they reflect the different desires of

individuals.

We have seen that the two main components of an individual choice are the feasible

opportunities and individuals desires or preferences. Or, as Elster (1992, 12) notes [],

actions are explained by opportunities and desires by what people can do and by what

they want to do. In this context, we need to understand that opportunities are external and

objective to individual who can not modify their structure by unilateral action. No matter I

do, I can not modify the set of feasible actions from which I have to choose. By contrary,

the desires are subjective and internal to individual (Elster: 1992, 20). From this distinction


25/221

25

between the natures of opportunities and desires we can derive two main arguments. The

first is that what is desirable for one individual is not necessary desirable for another. Thus,

since desires vary from individual to individual, the choice of one individual can not be

judged in relation with the goals the other individual pursues. The second argument is that

individuals usually make mistakes about the real structure of opportunities so that some

alternatives which are in the feasible set are let aside whereas other non-feasible

alternatives may be considered as available. Thus, what should explain the behaviour of

individuals from the perspective of a theory of choice are the desires of individual together

with her beliefs about the structure of opportunities (Elster 1992, 14).

2.3. Rationality and Rational Behaviour

As I point out above, a theory of individual choice should think about the desires of

individuals and their beliefs about the available opportunities. Certainly, every human

being has desires, acts to fulfil those desires and acquires certain knowledge (perfect or

imperfect) about the situation in which she takes action. Up to this point of our discussion,

the argument about individual choice and behaviour is far too general and we have nouseful yardstick to assess how individuals are going to choose in various situations.

I have argued above that we are interested in analyzing those social and political

situations in which individuals rationally choose a course of action against other possible

alternatives. But what rationality and rational behaviour mean in this context?

In daily language, the term rationality generally denotes either cognition or a

normative imperative. It is common to hear people arguing that it is not rational to act

without a proper thinking of what it should be done in that situation. A course of action

should come after a careful consideration of all implications of that action, and when we

fail to foresee them we usually say that our decisions were irrational. In this context, the

term rationality reflects a cognitive exercise of an individual who should be able to predict

all the consequences of her action. Thus, a rational behaviour is in this context a complex

calculus about the consequences of our decisions.


26/221

26

The second meaning, which is to certain extent complementary to the first

argument, suggests that the rational persons will choose those actions that are morally

superior to others. This is the case of social norms. Take for instance the social norm that

says we should keep our promises. If nobody respects the promises, then the institution of

assurance would become ineffective and nobody would trust anybody (Miroiu 2006, 36).

Such action is not congruent with the principle of morality because it breaks the Kantian

principle of universalism (an action is moral if it can be recommended to any actor) and

thus it can not be rational because it infringes the principle of morality.6

This meaning of

rationality is often brought as an argument for the claim that the voting behaviour of the

Romanians in the first elections was totally irrational as it infringed on the prospects of

democratic consolidation and economic reforms necessary for the general prosperity. Since

such purposes are morally superior to any other particular goals, such voting choice should

be regarded as irrational.

The first meaning of rationality points to how an individual reaches a decision and

the second meaning asks about the goals of individuals. Both of them are very restrictive in

the sense that they are impracticable when it comes to the analysis of individual behaviour.

We do not know or very often it is impossible to determine how an individual reaches a

decision. Also, we certainly do not want to infer that a course of action is morally superior

to other course of action because this is merely a philosophical issue, which, though

important for normative theory, is less helpful for analyzing human behaviour in social

contexts. So we need other criteria for defining rationality in order to analyse the behaviour

of individuals.

There is a third sense of rationality that can be used to describe and analyse the

individual behaviour. According to it, rationality represents the capacity of an individual to

undertake those actions that lead her to the fulfilment of personal desires, provided that the

object of her desire is in the feasible set of opportunities. According to this definition, the

rationality does not refer to the purposes an individual pursues in political, economic or

other social contexts or to the capacity of an individual to solve complex equations about

the context in which she takes action. Instead, this notion of rationality refers to the process

that links the desires (or goals) of individuals to their actions in political or economic

6 For a broader argument of Kantian principle of categorical imperative, see Miroiu (2006, 35-39).


27/221

27

circumstances. Rationality in this context is defined instrumentally and it refers to the

actions of an individual and not to her purposes.In this regard, we say that the behaviour of

an individual is rational if she is able to select those actions that lead to the fulfilment of

her desires.

Suppose now that we observe the behaviour of an individual A who would like to

spend the Sunday evening by going to cinema. We know that individualAs house is at the

crossroads of three different streets that lead to cinema (street C), to theatre (street T), and

to local football stadium (street S). The individualA has to select one of these three streets

as a course of action, knowing the destinations of each of them. Since we know (or we infer

on the bases of her past actions, for instance) that individualA wishes to watch a movie on

the Sunday evening, we say thatA acts rationally if she selects alternative C and irrationally

if she selects T or S instead. The reader should observe that in our hypothetical example I

do not infer which goal the individual A ought to pursue on moral bases and that her

feasible set of opportunities is clearly identified as SF(I)={Cinema, Theatre, Football}. As

choice in this context depends totally on how she orders these three opportunities on her

subjective utility scale. We assume that each of these possible actions produces a certain

benefit (or utility, in economics jargon), either positive or negative, to A and she is able to

select among the alternatives according to the subjective utilities she attaches to {Cinema},

{Theatre}, and {Football}.

There is one big danger that affects the theory of rational choice, for which the

discipline has been criticized: the tautological or simplistic explanations. Obviously we

wish to avoid inferring that all choices of individuals are rational because each individual

has certain preferences and, thus, all her actions necessarily reflect her preferences. Just

because an individual chooses a course of action, it is not enough to infer that she made a

rational choice and that the goal pursued gave her higher utility than any other feasible

alternative. Though explaining any kind of individual behaviour is tempting (after all, the

substantial argument of the rational choice is the intentionality of individual behaviour)7,

we need to be aware that such reckless argument about individual behaviour produces

7 We need to distinct between the intentional behaviour and the rational behaviour. Intention is an importantcomponent of rational behaviour; however, it is not sufficient to qualify a choice as rational.


28/221

28

theories with lower degree of falsifiability. For this purpose, the models of rational

behaviour have to be complex enough in order to avoid such sheer tautology.

How can we avoid tautological explanations? One answer resides in the internal

consistency of rational choice theories. Instead of saying only that any choice with the

property of maximizing the utility of an individual is a rational choice, we can formulate

some basic requirements that any rational individual choice has to fulfil. These

requirements have the property of constraining logically the individual preferences but, at

the same time, we do not wish to impose very severe restrictions to individual behaviour, so

that some preferences are a priori excluded.

Suppose that our individual A chooses again the alternative {Cinema} out of the

feasible set SF[I]={Cinema, Theatre, Football}. The feasible set S is non-empty, which

means there is at least one course of action available to the individual A. What can we say

about As choice? We obviously could say that the individual A chooses the alternative C

over the alternatives T and F. Or, in a more rational choice language, that the individual I

prefers C to T and F (or C is preferred to any other alternative from the feasible set). We

introduce here another crucial element of rational choice theory, which is the concept of

preference. This concept is important for the theory because it allows us to establish a

certain hierarchy between the alternatives from the feasible set. The choice of an individual

reflects her preference relation between the alternatives: the preferred alternatives produce

higher subjective utilities than less preferred alternatives. We can say, for instance, that the

individualAstrictly prefers C to T (CPAT) or C to F (CPAF) or that the individualAweakly

prefers C to T (CRAT) or C to F (CRAF), where P and R denote strict or weak preference

relationships between two alternatives. When an individual has a preference relation of the

type [(CRAT) & (TRAC)], it means that she is indifferent between the two alternatives C and

T, which we formally write as (CIAT).8

I have mentioned above that we need to impose certain constrains over the

individual preference relation in order to qualify a choice as rational. The very first

constrain of any rational preference is the reflexivity. Mathematically, we write this relation

as (xRix), which says that a certain goodx is at least as good as itself. Sen (1970) calls this

8 The strict preference relation between C and T (CPiT) may also be written as: C>T. The weak preferencerelation between C and T (CRiT) can be written as: CT.


29/221

29

the condition of mental sanity as it requires an individual i to choose the objectj as long as

what the individual i looks for is an object that has the same properties as j. Take for

instance the example of our individual A who wishes to spend the Sunday watching a

movie at the cinema. The condition of reflexivity asks that if the As goal is to go to the

cinema, then, ceteris paribus, any cinema is at least as good as another cinema. If the

individual A wishes to watch a movie and eat some pop-corn at the cinema, then any

cinema that sells pop-corn to customers is at least as good as any other cinema with the

same property of selling pop-corn to customers.

Second, to formulate a preference of the type I prefer Cinema to Theatre implies

that I am somehow able to compare the two alternatives, {Cinema} and {Theatre}. To

compare any two or more alternatives means that I am able to order these alternatives in a

manner that reflects strong or weak preference or indifference among alternatives. Thus, the

second condition any preference has to satisfy is the condition ofcompleteness (sometimes

called comparability). The comparability means that, given any two alternatives C and T,

we can say that either (CRiT) or (TRiC) or (CIiT).

The third condition regards the logic of ordering (or of comparability) of individual

preferences. This condition asks that any ordering of three or more alternatives available in

the feasible set should be transitive, so that an individual i who prefers C to T and T to F

prefers necessarily C to F. Formally, we write this condition oftransitivity as:

)()()(],,[:,, cRftRfcRtSftcftc ,

which reads that whatever three alternatives c, t, and f included in the non-empty set of

feasible alternatives, if c is weakly preferred to t that is weakly preferred to f, then c is

weakly preferred to f. The relation of weak preference can be changed to reflect a strong

preference, but the condition of transitivity can not be abandoned if we talk about a rational

decision. Transitivity is a very important condition of rationality. Imagine that one

individual has a preference ordering that is not transitive, so that she prefers C to T, T to F,

but F to C. Having such order of preferences, this individual will not be able to select a

course of action because no matter what alternative she chooses, there will be always

another alternative preferred to the first alternative. Such distribution of preferences is

called as cyclical ordering of preferences.


30/221

30

Now, we are better equipped to define rationality and rational behaviour in the

theory of rational choice. We call that an individual i acts (chooses or behaves) rationally if

she is able to order the set of feasible alternatives according to her personal tastes or values

in a manner that respects the conditions of reflexivity, completeness and transitivity, and

after ordering the set of alternatives, she chooses from top of this ordering. Observe that

this definition of rationality and rational behaviour encloses two major elements. The first

element is the internally consistent ordering of feasible alternatives so that it does not hold

logical faults like the cyclical ordering of preferences. Then, once an individual has been

able to define and arrange her preferences without violating the conditions of reflexivity,

completeness and transitivity, the second element comes into place: the individual will

choose according to the maximization principle.

2.4. Rational Politicians and Political Action

A detractor of rational choice theory would fiercely contest that such definition of

rationality and the subsequent theory of action are relevant for the study of politics. Her

arguments would probably point to the distinction between politics and other dailyactivities or between the study of politics and other academic disciplines such as

economics. Contrary to economics where the goals of firms are very much evident and the

struggles of firms for higher profits raise little debate, the goals of political actors are

considered to be far more diverse. As I mention above, the typical argument about the

peculiarity of politics that allegedly makes irrelevant the rational choices is that values

play a very important role in politics. Because the behaviour of individuals in politics is

very much influenced by political and social values, a theory of political action that

concentrates on the rationality of individuals is going to fail at explaining the political

outcomes. Any theory of political behaviour that aims at explaining political phenomena, a

detractor of rational choice theory would argue, has to take into account not only the role of

political, social and cultural values, but also the diversity of these values in the society. For

these reasons, a theory of rational choice in politics is meaningless.


31/221

31

I do believe that such argument has serious flaws. Values affect the behaviour of

individuals in various other situations, not only in politics. The physicist that studies the

origins of the universe has her own values which might be undermined by the results of her

scientific research. Nor biologists are not value-free scientists. And yet, there is very much

a non-sense to argue that the approach of these scientists should take into account their own

values, because it affects the way they describe or explain physical or biological

phenomena. Economics is one example of social sciences in which the role of values is

quite significant. Welfare economics, for instance, extensively studied in the last fifty years

the role of values and other normative issues. Thus, there is no a priori reason to believe

that values and norms particularly influence the study of politics while they do not have an

effect on other disciplines from social or natural sciences.

Another flaw of the argument against rational choice theory is that the notion of

rationality is often applied to goals rather than to the process through which an individual

attains such goals. To argue that values and norms influence the behaviour of individuals

refers, as it seems to me, to the definition of goals and preferences of individuals rather than

to the way an individual behaves when she has to choose among different alternatives.

Rational choice theory acknowledges that values, norms and tastes have an enormous

influence on the formation of individual preferences, and thus different goals result from

the diversity of values, norms and tastes of individuals.

Furthermore, we acknowledge that some situations are difficult to be framed in

models of rational choice or when framed, it leads to tautological explanations. We would

not want to explain, for instance, why the terrorists from 9/11 acted the way they did by

framing the situation into a rational choice model, because their behaviour complied rather

with a social norm than reflected a rational decision. Many rational choice scholars would

argue that if the terrorists had a preference relation of the type I discussed above, it would

violate the condition of completeness. It is difficult, if not impossible, to argue that the

terrorists meaningfully compared the possible alternatives and reached the decision after

such comparison. Anyhow, probably models of rational choice bring no further knowledge

about the behaviour of individuals when it comes at explaining suicidal or other similar

behaviours. But when it comes to situations in which individuals choose without the


32/221

32

obvious constrains of social norms, the rational choice theory is a very powerful instrument

at our disposal for explaining social or political outcomes.

In politics, the rational choice theory treats politicians as being rational political

actors. As any other individuals, politicians have their own tastes and desires and we

assume in our research that their political behaviour is meant to fulfil such desires. This

assumption does carry neither positive, nor negative normative content, usually common in

the appraisal of politicians. Contrary to the popular evaluation of how politicians behave,

the rational choice theory does not simply regard politicians as pure selfish individuals that

are interested only in their own wealth. On the other hand, nor it does argue that the role of

politicians is to seek and provide common goods, as normative theories of politics often

imply. Instead, it takes a more positive (or neutral) position in this respect, assuming that a

politician behaves as any other rational individual would do in political or social context.

Thus, any politician is able to observe what is her feasible set of options in a given political

situation, to arrange the alternatives from the feasible set according to the utilities they

provide with so that the preference ordering is not cyclical, and finally, to select the

alternative that lays at the top of the preference ordering.

The goals of politicians may also differ from situation to situation. A politician

running for a public office in competition with other candidates wishes to win the election,

and we say that she acts rationally when she takes those actions that would lead her at

winning. She may have personal stakes in running for such position because public offices

offer private goods to the politicians who hold those positions. Or, by contrary, she may

perceive such office as an instrument for having an impact on politics.9 A politician in the

legislature who is interested to pass legislation in a certain domain will lobby at other

colleagues, both from the government and opposition, in order to receive political support

for the bill. She may have a genuine interest in passing this legislation or she may want to

exploit the issue in the future political campaigns, claiming that she was successful in

providing her voters with such public good. When member of Cabinet, a politician would

probably struggle to receive a greater budget for the ministry she runs because having

access to more resources provides more political influence. All the above examples point to

9 For an extensive argument about the distinction between private and public goods see Olson (1971). For auseful synthesis of the argument, see Miroiu (2007, 117-64).


33/221

33

how we expect politicians to behave in different hypothetical situations. If we observe them

behaving differently, we may conclude that either their behaviour is irrational (they do not

act to accomplish the highest preference) or our model about the individual behaviour in

that situation is based on incomplete or inappropriate assumptions. Thus, it is very

important to specify carefully the assumptions we have about the goals of individuals in

political situations so that our models are not based on implausible postulations about the

individual behaviour.

2.5. Two Views on Political Competition: Sociological and Economic Models

The social and political conflict fuelled the debate about the role of political parties in

modern democracies for a long period of time. Initially seen as menaces for the republican

government because they were conspicuously supposed to function in a manner that spread

the political dissent inside the political system, political parties became institutionalized as

essential elements of democratic regime once the conflict and the potential for dissent were

recognized as essential pillars of the modern political democracies (Dahl 1971, 1989).10

The electoral competition became one of the main institutional guarantees of the modernpolitical democracies and the political parties have been the key political actors that

participated in the electoral game since the mid-XIX century.

Elections are essential institutions through which a democratic government is

formed. They decide what party is going to form the Cabinet in majoritarian democracies or

what parties win parliamentary representation and negotiate the government formation in

the multiparty systems. They allow leaders to win offices and implement certain policy

programs that are important to party activists and voters. Also, they represent an important

mechanism of political accountability: the political parties need to maintain their electoral

support if they want to have a future in politics. Unreliable political parties, which do not

10 Sartori (1976) offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of political parties from loose politicalorganizations (proto-parties in Sartoris terminology) to fully institutionalized political organizations and ofthe relationship between political parties, party government and the acceptance of the conflict in the moderndemocracies.


34/221

34

govern the way they promised and which are unable to deliver the political goods they

pledged, are going to be rejected in future elections by dissatisfied voters. A c

grecu, razvan - party competition in central and eastern europe (teza doctorat)

Documents