SEMINARS SPRING 2008
HONR209J Why Is It So Hard To Have Good Government?
Tuesday/Thursday 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Professor Joe A. Oppenheimer, Department of Government and Politics
In most corners of the globe, people are downtrodden and their politicians prosper. People everywhere with sufficient money are usually able to satisfy their private needs quite easily: just go to the super market and plop down your credit card. Not so for their collective needs: security, good schools, clean environments. What makes politics such a hard and deadly game for the people to win? Must it be so, and if not, what can we do about it? That is the pursuit of this course. We will examine in depth just a few small puzzles which have been solved since, and in part because of, John Nash's contributions to game theory (A Beautiful Mind). We will complement these with readings about the political. Specifically we will examine:
1. The pitfalls of collective action and how to overcome them;
2. The implications of the aims of politics for the naturally violent
and deadly
structure of political competition;
3. The strange properties of democracy;
4. The limits and properties of voting; and
5. The effect of design on institutional performance.
The course will use trivial (i.e. algebraic) mathematical tools to develop approaches to understanding these and other aspects of our political worlds. We will illustrate the models by reference to serious case histories of political problems. The course should be useful to all who have an interest in social and political problems. So the course is about governmental institutions and political behavior. What are governments? What can we expect from governments? What is political behavior? Of course, we know what governments are! They are the organizations to which we pay taxes and from which we get parks, schools, wars, and armies. What is political behavior? We know that too. Political behavior is what a politician engages in to win an election. It is also voting, lobbying, and speaking out, or going to court to force the government to deliver on one's social security check. Since these types of political activity are common, we do not devote much time to identifying them. Rather, we seek some general properties of all governments and of all political behavior. Not just any properties: those which give you leverage to evaluate and predict governmental and political performance. In the same spirit, in order to assess what we get from our form of government, we see what one can expect from other forms of government. Thus, we shall be as interested in political behavior during a revolution as in an American election. We shall be as concerned with governmental institutions in modern America as in other places.
Any subject can be looked at from many different points of view. Any single viewpoint filters questions and answers. For example, one could ask, "What are the many types of government which can exist?" Not us. We shall develop a framework to generate hypotheses about political behavior in general. Let me give you a sample of some of our questions:
1. In what ways does human selfishness and reasoning effect politics and determine the nature of political outcomes? 2. Why do we need political institutions at all? 3. How do property rights, and the distribution of income and wealth limit what we can expect as outcomes from our political institutions? 4. Do democratic rules change the outcomes of political processes and if so, how? 5. Can we achieve social justice and if so, how? 6. What is the responsibility of a citizen? 7. What problems exist when we apply our normal notions of ethics to politics?
In answering these sorts of questions, we first develop a general theoretical argument: a general theory of non-market behavior to analyze the questions above. The theory is based on the same psychological assumptions used to explain market behavior in economics. Of course, we must spend some time checking the theory against reality to see how it fares.
The course involves two types of reading: theoretical and case oriented. The theoretical readings cover material that has won a number of Nobel Prizes in Economics over the last 20 years. The approach includes materials from political science, economics, sociology, and political philosophy. They will help us obtain general answers to questions about politics and government. This literature includes current theoretical formulations known as public choice (a part of political economy) as well as readings that give us a set of political events we can talk about and to which we can apply our theoretical tools.
CORE: Behavioral & Social Science [SB]
