Government 2005

Theory of Collective Choice: Strategy, Voting, and Choice

Course Description:

The subject of this course is an introduction to three basic principles for the analysis of political behavior: decision theory, social choice theory, and game theory. These theories form the foundation for the rational choice approach to the study of politics. While rational choice is often associated with formal mathematical modeling, an intuitive understanding of the concepts underlying this approach is essential to anyone who hopes to make convincing arguments about the way politics works. The focus of this course is on strategic interactions in which one person's strategy must take into account the strategies that others will adopt. The application of rational choice theory to politics is sometimes referred to as the "New Institutionalism." This name stems from the important role that institutional structure plays in deriving game theoretic models of political decision making. The structure of an institution in which political actors make their strategic decisions actually defines the rules of game that these actors can be thought to be playing.

The institutions we will be examining within this course are legislatures, legislative committees, courts, and treaties, among others. Among the topics to be studied within these "institutional laboratories" are strategic voting, coalition formation, agenda setting, and the provision of public goods. This is primarily a methods course. I will focus my attention on providing you with the tools to analyze systematically strategic situations in politics, broadly defined. The policy making examples we examine are meant to be illustrative, rather than providing the primary focus of the course. Therefore, the course is divided into sections along analytical methods lines, not substantive policy area or institutional lines.

This course will require careful and systematic reasoning on your part. There will be a fair amount of algebra, and perhaps some simple calculus. It is also helpful to know something about basic probability theory. This course is designed to give you a firm grounding in the included topics specifically and positive political theory generally and to serve as a launching pad for further study. The continuation of this course in the Spring semester is Gov 2006, to be taught by Professors James Snyder (of MIT) and John Aldrich (Visiting Harvard from Duke). Gov 2006 is a topics course and is correspondingly organized according to areas of sustantive interest. This course will also provide an excellent grounding for Gov 2160, Gov 2162, and Gov 2761.

This course meets once per week, Wednesday from 4:00pm to 6:00pm. While the amount of new material we must cover requires a mostly lecture format, I encourage you to ask questions and generally participate in class as much as possible. The only stupid question is the one that is never asked. The more interaction we have in class, the clearer the material will become. I will try to set aside some time each week for discussion, in order to provide us an opportunity to investigate together how this material may be useful to you in your varied scholarly pursuits.

Reading Materials:

There are five texts required for the Gov 2050. (1) Dixit, Avinash, and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1991); (2) Ordeshook, Peter, Game Theory and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986); (3) Arrow, Kenneth, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963); (4) Riker, William, Liberalism Against Populism (Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, 1982); and (5) Kreps, David Game Theory and Economic Modelling (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990). These are all available at the Harvard Coop. I will also be assigning articles to be read for most classes. These will be available in a bound reader form at the University Copy Center, located in the basement of Pound Hall, at the Law School. I will have it photocopied on two sides in an attempt to cut down on the bulk as well as the cost.

Assignments:

I will assign problem sets approximately weekly. These are designed both to test your understanding of the material as well as to let you explore how these tools can be applied to more realistic political decision making situations. There is likely to be a question on each set that either asks you to indicate how you would approach a particular modelling problem, or asks you to give an example of a particular strategic concept from your own field. The problem sets will count for 30% of your final grade.

Students in Gov 2005 will be required to write a paper for this class. There are two options available. (1) For students who plan to take Gov 2006 in the Spring, the paper should take the form of a research proposal. During the Fall term, students should choose a topic of interest, conduct a literature review, identify a manageable question to be addressed, and choose a modelling strategy to employ in an attempt to answer that question. Students who choose this option will be expected to have some preliminary results by the end of the term. (2) For students who will not be taking Gov 2006, a shorter, but complete, paper is required. These students should choose simple questions to be addressed. Simple extensions of existing models make good topics for these papers. All students will be required to present their work in progress during the last couple of weeks of the term. All students will be required to turn in to me a brief (two page) paper proposal by November 13. I will then meet with students individually to discuss their paper topics. The papers/proposals count for 60% of the final grade. The presentations count for 10%.

__________________________________________________________

Strategic Interaction: An Introduction

September 18:

Preliminaries, Examples, and Introduction to game trees and backward induction. Read Chapter 1 of Thinking Strategically, Chapters 1 and 2 of Game Theory and Economic Modelling, and Riker, "The Entry of Game Theory into Political Science," (History of Pol. Econ. Ann., 22:207-223).

September 25:

Sequential games. Read Chapter 2 of Thinking Strategically, Game Theory and Economic Modelling, pp. 13-20, Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 97-106, and Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman, "The Road to War is Strewn with Peaceful Intentions," in Ordeshook, ed., Models of Strategic Choice in Politics, pp. 253-267.

October 2:

Simultaneous games. Read Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of Thinking Strategically, Game Theory and Economic Modelling, pp. 10-13, 21-36, and Chapter 5 of Game Theory and Political Theory.

October 9:

Uncertainty, Coordination, and Mixed Strategies. Read Chapters 6 and 7 of Thinking Strategically, and Chapters 4 and 5 of Game Theory and Economic Modelling.

October 16:

Repeat play and the evolution of cooperation. Read Chapter 10 of Liberalism Against Populism, Bendor, "In Good Times and Bad: Reciprocity in an Uncertain World," (AJPS, 31:531), and Schwartz, "Trade in a World Most Uncertain," (working paper).

Voting over Discrete Alternatives:

October 23:

Preference orderings, Voting Trees, and the Condorcet Paradox. Read Thinking Strategically, pp. 267-285, Chapters 1 and 2 of Social Choice and Individual Values, Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 1-15; 65-73 and Chapters 1 and 2 of Liberalism Against Populism.

October 30:

Amendment agendas, covering, and sophisticated voting. Read Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 266-284, Liberalism Against Populism, Ch. 6, and pp. 65-81, Denzau, Riker, and Shepsle, "Farquharson and Fenno: Sophisiticated Voting and Home Style," (APSR, 79:1117), Krehbiel and Rivers "Sophisticated Voting in Congress: A Reconsideration," (JOP, 52:548), and Austen-Smith, "Sophisticated Sincerity: Voting over Endogenous Agendas," (APSR, 81:1323, 1987).

The Spatial Theory of Voting

November 6:

Utility functions, Euclidean preferences, and the Median Voter Theorem. Read Thinking Strategically, pp. 259-264, Chapters 1 and 2 of The Spatial Theory of Voting, Social Choice and Individual Values, pp. 74-80, Chapter 3 of Liberalism Against Populism, Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 16-52; 160-166, Ferejohn and Shipan, "Congressional Influence on Bureaucracy," (J Law, Econ., and Org., 6(sp):1), and Romer and Rosenthal, "Political Resource Allocation, Controlled Agendas, and the Status Quo," (Public Choice, 33:27).

November 13:

Moving from one dimension to many. Read Denzau and Mackay, "Gatekeeping and Monopoly Power of Committees: An Analysis of Sincere and Sophisticated Behavior," (AJPS, 27:740), Shepsle, "Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models," (AJPS, 23(1):27), Ferejohn and Krehbiel, "The Budget Process and the Size of the Budget," (AJPS, 79:296), Liberalism Against Populism, pp. 169-181, and Calvert, "Robustness of the Multidimensional Voting Model: Candidate Motivations, Uncertainty, and Convergence," (AJPS, 29:69).

Chaos and Impossibility

November 20:

The arbitrariness of majority rule. Read Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 166-175; 243-266, Chapter 3 of The Spatial Theory of Voting, Plott, "A Notion of Equilibrium and Its Possibility Under Majority Rule," (AER, 57:787, 1967), and McKelvey, "Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control," (JET, 12:472, 1976).

November 27:

Thanksgiving Recess. No Class.

December 4:

The Pareto set, the Uncovered set, and the core. Read Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 73-82, Epstein, "Uncovering Some Subtleties of the Uncovered Set," (working paper), McKelvey, "Covering, Dominance, and Institution-Free Properties of Social Choice, (AJPS, 30:283, 1986), Shepsle and Weingast, "Uncovered Sets and Sophisticated Voting Outcomes with Implications for Agenda Institutions," (AJPS, 28:49-74), and Liberalism Against Populism, pp. 181-196.

December 11:

Arrow's Theorem. Read Chapters 3 and 5 of Social Choice and Individual Values, Game Theory and Political Theory, pp. 53-65, Blau, "A Direct Proof of Arrow's Theorem," (Econometrica, 40: 61-67), and Chapter 5 of Liberalism Against Populism.

Combining Game Theory and Voting Theory

December 18:

Sequential Bargaining. Read Chapter 11 of Thinking Strategically, Baron and Ferejohn, "Bargaining in Legislatures," (APSR, 83:1181), and Baron, "A Spatial Bargaining Theory of Government Formation in Parliamentary Systems," (APSR, 85: 137-64).