Contract by Convention in Politics

“Since one of the best ways to test an idea is to ride it into the ground,” Schattschneider wryly observes, “political theory has unquestionably been improved by the heroic attempt to create a political universe revolving about the group.” ¹ Since the group theory of politics was, in Schattschneider’s view, already ridden to death by 1960, perhaps I should be at pains to justify my still trying to saddle it two decades later. The short justification is that I am not concerned with a theory of politics in general, but only with a theory of group action. Given such a theory, one should naturally be concerned with its significance in helping to explain political outcomes, even if one did not think it the only relevant consideration. An irony of the simplistic pluralism—which Schattschneider criticizes—that sees political outcomes as the vector sums of forces from groups is that, if outcomes were merely vector sums, there would be little politics. There would only be the paraphernalia of enforcement. Political science would reduce to such principles as the Coase theorem, which says that in the absence of transactions costs, overall economic efficiency is not a function of which governmental institutions or laws we have, because if one of my activities benefits me less than it harms you, you can contract with me to stop it. ² But political institutions have a partly autonomous existence, and they play enormous roles in determining political outcomes.