Abstract
When I sat down to reflect on Norman Schofield’s work and his place in political science I couldn’t help recalling a passage written by Richard McKelvey, a contemporary, colleague, and coauthor of Schofield’s. In a 2001 report written for the NSF, McKelvey noted that: “One of the big problems in political theory, which distinguishes it from economic theory, is the absence of any general equilibrium theory from which to start the theoretical enterprise. The lack of general equilibrium in political science has put theoretical work in political science in a kind of limbo.”
A consequence of this limbo is that, absent any general predictions that might be arrived at as a function of societal preferences, formal theory in political science has evolved to focus on institutional specificity (with variation in information, timing, and power) as its primary means of saying things. The rejection of general models1 in favor of applied models has opened up a rich set of questions and hypotheses that were potentially unanswerable in an “institution-free” context, and has led to a political science where formal models have been applied to virtually every corner of the discipline.
At the same time, the widespread acceptance of the idea that a quest for general equilibria in politics is an intellectual dead end depresses me. This is not because my own work is particularly general (it’s not), and it’s not because of any distaste on my part toward applied modeling in political science, which I think has produced a genuinely cumulative and foundational body of knowledge. Rather, it’s because it seems an admission of defeat.
It’s as if the formal theory community has thrown up its hands to say “We’ve given up on trying to deduce truths about politics.” Or at the least, we’ve given up on trying to defend ourselves from that criticism by others.
I had the privilege of being Schofield’s colleague for six years at Washington University in St. Louis, and those who have spent time in that department may recognize why I have started this introduction this way. A typical Schofield reaction to a seminar was “What does this tell us about the truth?” And maybe a few minutes later, “When I was your age I proved a classification theorem!” It was easy to smile at comments like these, but they weren’t the reflections of a prickly professor bemoaning the current state of his field. They were serious questions, stemming from the fact that Schofield has dedicated his career to a (highly unpragmatic) search for general truths in political science: how societies adapt to political crisis, how political operatives position themselves within the landscape of societal preferences, and how structural stability and chaos can emerge within economic and political systems. This search for truth, in my opinion, distinguishes Schofield’s legacy from that of any other formal political theorist.
This special issue in honor of Schofield is long overdue. Its five articles touch both directly and indirectly on major themes in Schofield’s work, and reflect the vast scope of these themes. Two articles are related to Schofield’s work on the development of institutions in early America. Finocchiaro and Jenkins (2016) trace the roots of present day distributive politics to the antebellum era of American politics. They argue that the pre-modern Congress not only faced pressure to respond to their constituents via position-taking on issues, but also (and previously more unexplored) by seeking to provide constituents with tangible, particularistic benefits. Klašnja (2016) focuses on a different aspect of the electoral connection between politicians and constituents: corruption in developing democracies. He shows that dynamically increasing rents to politicians, due to their cultivation of rent-extraction networks while in office, leads to incumbent disadvantage and a decrease in candidate quality. These effects are strictly more costly to society than when rents are high but constant, highlighting a different explanation for the need to control the dynamics of corruption.
Two articles focus on party valence in spatial models of comparative politics. Micozzi and Saiegh (2016) utilize Schofield’s stochastic valence model of politics to recover party positions in Argentina circa 1955-1966, an era characterized by gridlock between the Peronists and the anti-Peronists. They show that rather than being an “impossible game” stemming from the absence of political equilibria, the obstacle for political stability of this era was the plethora of equilibria predicted by Schofield’s framework. The second article in this vein, Gallego and Schofield (2016), is by Schofield himself, along with his longtime collaborator Maria Gallego. They apply Schofield’s stochastic model of politics to a variety of countries and political regimes, calculating a “convergence coefficient” for each regime that characterizes the centripetal or centrifugal tendency acting on parties within the system. They show that centrifugal forces are highest in systems of proportional representation, leading parties to locate far from the electoral mean. Conversely, centripetal forces dominate under majoritarian systems.
Last, Sean Ingham (2016) returns to a different subject that Schofield has played a major role in developing: social choice theory, and the predictive challenges it presents. Taking core nonexistence as a given, Ingham presents a solution concept in the spirit of Schofield’s heart that calculates a non-empty region of maximal acceptability to every majority, and hence, maximal majority control over the policy choices made by officeholders. He concludes with a game-theoretic microfoundation for the solution concept.
I have known Norman Schofield for most of my career, and during that time I have been proud to call him my mentor, colleague, and friend. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his vision of political science. I hope that this special issue serves to continue his legacy and, hopefully, to inspire people to revisit a search for truth in politics.