Constructing _Us__ Ideology, Coalition P - Bawn_ Kathleen

Constructing "Us": Ideology, Coalition Politics, and False ConsciousnessAuthor(s): Kathleen BawnReviewed work(s):Source: American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 303-334Published by: Midwest Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2991797 .Accessed: 15/09/2012 14:01

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Constructing "Us ": Ideology, Coalition Politics, and False Consciousness Kathleen Bawn, University of California, Los Angeles

Ideology matters in politics because it causes people to care about issues in which they have no direct stake. Indeed, ideological preferences are often decisive in democratic decision making, as votes cast on the basis of ideology can easily overwhelm those cast on the basis of direct self-interest. By creating preference in the absence of interest, ideologies create coalitions that otherwise might not exist. This paper models ideologies as equilibria in a repeated game of political decision making. The variety of equilibria is interpreted as reflecting the variety of ideologies operating in the political world. The model allows me to define the value of an ideology and to develop a sequential choice model of bargaining to understand how elites strategically shape ideology. The model offers results about (1) the circumstances under which particular types of ideologies can be sustained and (2) how common interest affects the formation of ideologies. I show that common interest will not always be cemented by ideology. That is, it is possible for false consciousness to arise from rational self-interested behavior.

Ideology is critical to politics because it causes people to have preferences and opinions about issues in which they have no direct stake. Many people who live and work in homogeneous English-speaking communities, for example, have opinions about bilingual education. The treatment of gays in the military evokes strong feelings among many heterosexual civilians. Many U.S. citizens who never plan to travel abroad care deeply about curb- ing human rights abuses in remote corners of the world. Many men strongly support (or oppose) abortion rights, even if they believe that their own wives and daughters would never have an abortion.

These opinions formed in the absence of direct interest have significant political consequences.1 Blocks of citizens organized around these "ideological" preferences affect policy decisions by casting votes, writing letters,

This project began when I was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and I am grateful to Barry Weingast and Douglass North for helpful conversations that got me started. Since then, many others have given me comments and encouragement. I would especially like to thank John Aldrich, Dick Anderson, Len Binder, Rui de Figueiredo, Thrainn Eggertsson, Jeff Frieden, Miriam Golden, Jack Hirschleifer, Scott Page, John Petrocik, Ron Rogowski, Barbara Sinclair, Ken Shepsle, Roland Sturm, Sid Tarrow, Brian Walker, Robyn Womall, John Zaller, and seminar participants at the Uni- versities of Iowa and Michigan and at UCLA. Research support from the Hoover Institution and by the UCLA Academic Senate is gratefully acknowledged.

1See the essays in Mansbridge (1990) for an overview of why direct self-interest alone is unable to explain much of political life.

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, No. 2, April 1999, Pp. 303-334 ?1999 Midwest Political Science Association

304 Kathleen Bawn

demonstrating, and through other means of political participation. Indeed, the number of people substantively affected by a policy decision is often small compared to the number of people who hold opinions on it. Opinions based on something other than direct self-interest are decisive in many policy decisions.

In talking about preferences that do not derive from self-interest, we might speak of empathy for the victims of human rights abuses, or identification with the plight of a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy. Or we might simply say that the preferences are not motivated by interest, but by ideology. While empathy, identity, and ideology are not the same thing, they share an ability to create preference in the absence of (or in opposition to) direct self-interest. I will use the word "ideology" as a catch-all to refer to all opinions and preferences that arise from anything other than a direct personal stake in the issue.2 I will use "interest" in the narrow sense of a direct personal stake. This is not to say that ideology and interest are necessarily opposites. Indeed, my point is to show how ideological behavior can arise out of self-interested behavior in political contexts.

My central claim is that ideologies create preferences by defining coalitions. Ideologies place people clearly on one side of issues about which, on the basis of interest alone, they would be indifferent. In this way, ideologies forge coalitions between those who are substantively affected by an issue and those whose preferences arise in some other fashion. Some ideologies are quite explicit about the coalitions they create. For example, Marxism defines coalitions in terms of class ("Workers of the world unite") and feminism in terms of gender ("Sisterhood is powerful"). Other ideologies define coalitions implicitly. While libertarianism, for example, does not explicitly emphasize the interests of one group over another, a libertarian nonetheless finds herself an ally of those who want to smoke in public, carry a gun, or distribute pornography over the internet.

What can we learn by thinking of ideologies as coalitions? When will ideologies reflect underlying common interest? Are the coalitions created by ideologies "natural" in the sense of uniting those people with a common stake in important issues? Or do they operate in a more arbitrary manner? That is, can ideologies arising from rational, self-interested behavior nonetheless create "false consciousness"?

2Using the term "ideology" to talk about preferences that do not arise out of direct self-interest highlights the feature that I wish to address, but downplays other features associated with its ordinary usage. Most notable is that ideology can serve as an informational shortcut by which relatively uninformed mass publics evaluate the performance and proposals of elites. This idea has been developed in some depth by Hinich and Munger (1992, 1994). I hope that a clearer understanding of the coalition politics of ideology will aid in understanding these other aspects and effects.

IDEOLOGY, COALITION POLITICS, AND FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS 305

I show that false consciousness is possible, subject to limits. When common interest is clear and significant, prevailing ideologies will reflect it. But in less extreme cases, ideologies can split what seem to be natural coalitions. I make this argument with two game theoretic models. The first, the "Game of Politics," shows how different patterns of selective cooperation can arise as different equilibria in a repeated game. These equilibria give rise to behavior that an observer might attribute to ideology, identity, or moral prin- ciples. The main point of the Game of Politics is to make precise the analogy between coalitions and ideology, but it also generates comparative statics about when ideologies might fail. In the second model, the "Game of Ideol- ogy," ideology is endogenous, as players bargain over what equilibrium to play in the Game of Politics. The point of the Game of Ideology is to deter- mine what sort of ideologies will arise in different circumstances. In particular, when will ideologies reflect common interest, and when will they create false consciousness?

I will proceed as follows. In Section 1, I establish some basic definitions and briefly review the literature on which I build, the game theoretic literature on culture and ideas. Section 2 defines the Game of Politics. Section 3 shows how behavior that looks like ideology arises in various equilibria and offers a natural way to define the value of an ideology to a particular individual. Section 4 uses the values of ideologies as the foundation of the Game of Ideology, in which ideology is endogenous. This game addresses the questions of why one ideology is adopted and others are not. Section 5 discusses some problems with the framework, and Section 6 concludes.

1. DEFINITIONS AND BACKGROUND: IDEOLOGY, CULTURE, AND GAME THEORY

In trying to explain preferences not directly linked to interest, I will focus only on those that give rise to some action-be it as minimal as express- ing an opinion to an anonymous pollster or as dramatic as standing in front of a tank rolling across Tiananmen Square. Preferences that are never ex- pressed through any action at all-if such things exist-are beyond the scope of this study. The focus on actions, that is, on revealed preferences, suggests the following definition of ideology. Ideology is an enduring system of beliefs, prescribing what action to take in a variety of political circumstances. For example, if an abortion clinic opens in my neighborhood, my ideology tells me whether I should (a) picket the entrance, (b) write a check to support the clinic, or (c) do nothing.

It should be clear that this definition of ideology encompasses some of the other terms mentioned above: identity, moral values, etc. I may choose to picket because of my Christian values, to write a check because of my feminist identity, to do nothing because of my libertarian ideology. While there

306 Kathleen Bawn

are differences between the concepts of ideology, identity, and values, my theory is not sufficiently developed to make distinctions between them.

This definition establishes a somewhat complicated relationship between interest and ideology. They are not mutually exclusive alternative explanations for behavior. Rather, interest is a potential component of ideology. To take the extreme example, an ideology that directs its subscribers to always act in their direct self-interest would fit the above definition. In less extreme examples, an ideology tells its subscribers when to act in their direct self-interest and when to act on some other basis.

My theory proposes that all ideologies have interest at their core, but that interest is mediated by the social and political environment. What makes a system of beliefs "enduring" is that its subscribers do better in the long run by following the ideology's prescriptions than they would by deviating, given the actions of others. This requirement that prescriptions be enduring constitutes something like the "constraints" that Converse (1964) argues characterize belief systems (a term that also seems to encompass both ideology and related concepts). Indeed, I agree with Converse's claim that "the sources of constraint are much less logical in the classical sense than they are psychological-and less psychological than social" (1964, 209). My notion of how social constraints operate is more restrictive, however.3

Many readers will have noticed key concepts from game theory lurking anonymously in the above discussion. Specifically, if the "variety of political circumstances" can be represented as a game, then my definition of ideology matches the standard definition of a strategy, that is, an action to take at every node. And the requirement that an ideology be "enduring" simply means that the strategy must be part of a Nash equilibrium.

A notable property of Nash equilibria is that they are often not unique. In particular, when players interact repeatedly over an indefinite time horizon, a wide variety of behavior patterns can be sustained as equilibria. This result was widely understood long before it was formally derived (Fudenberg and Maskin 1986) and hence is generally referred to as the "folk theorem."

The inevitability of multiple equilibria in repeated games is sometimes interpreted as evidence that game theory is not useful for social science, that is, that repeated games do not produce testable hypotheses. An alternative reaction is that, in Calvert's words, "the multiplicity of equilibria is a basic and real feature of human interaction, a deep truth about social life, accu- rately represented by game theoretic models" (1997, 136).

By treating multiple equilibria as a serious implication about human society as opposed to a methodological nuisance, scholars like Calvert have

3My notion of how psychological constraints operate, on the other hand, is less restrictive than Converse's.


begun to use game theory to address questions about the roles of culture and ideas in political life. The seminal article in this emerging literature is by Kreps (1990), who argues that different cultures can be understood as different equilibria. The work done here by culture is coordination, the creation of shared expectations about what sort of actions are socially acceptable and what actions merit punishment.

Kreps builds on Schelling's (1960) insight that coordination is easy when there is an obvious "focal point" on which to coordinate. Culture, then, can be thought of as a set of focal points, one that emerges and evolves in a decentralized way. Other focal points, however, are explicitly constructed and manipulated by goal-oriented elites. Garrett and Weingast (1993) show how strategic elites use ideas to construct focal points around specific issues, such as the European Community's single market. Garrett and Weingast's more general contribution is to show ideas can be treated as endogenous.4 This is an important step-if culture and ideas matter as coor- dinating devices, then we want to have a theory of how they come about.

My goal here is expand this game theoretic literature on culture and ideas to incorporate a key feature of politics: coalition formation. In doing so, I shift the focus away from culture, which determines the nature of cooperation in the face-to-face interaction of everyday life, and toward ideology, which coordinates political behavior in larger arenas.5 In the models below, I incorporate the key political feature of coalitions into a model of repeated interaction. This allows me to advance the ball in three ways. First, I develop Garrett and Weingast's claim about the strategic manipulation of ideas into a formal model of ideology. Second, I generate predictions about how social and political circumstances affect the emergence and disappearance of different types of ideology. Third, I offer an interest-based explanation of why people care about things that don't affect them directly.6

My "explanation" that ideology creates preference in the absence of interest is, of course, tautological, in that I deliberately constructed my definition of ideology to answer this question. What is not tautological, however, is the theory developed in the remainder of this discussion. It will take

4See also Weingast 1995 and Bates and Weingast 1995. 5I do not mean to imply that culture and ideology are mutually exclusive. Indeed, when we talk

about "political culture" or the "American Ethos" (McCloskey and Zaller 1984) we often mean something that has the characteristics of both ideology and culture in the everyday use of the words. I hope that this attempt to model ideology will be a step towards clarifying the relationship between it and culture.

61 am not arguing here that interest is the only plausible explanatory mechanism in political science, but it is the only one I will use in this paper. I want to show that we can understand ideology as something that arises from interest and the structure of political interaction. We do not have to treat it as an external constraint, along the lines of Roemer (1985).

308 Kathleen Bawn

nontautological positions on two issues. First, what makes an ideology stable? My claim is that it must be a Nash equilibrium. Second, where do ideologies come from? I claim that they are proposed by strategic elites to maximize long-term gains. From these positions, I will be able to derive a result that clarifies the relationship between ideology and short-term interest.

2. KEY ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL DECISIONS: MODELING THE GAME OF POLITICS

This section develops an extremely basic model to explore the analogy between coalitions and ideologies, incorporating four key elements of political interaction.

First, political decisions create social conflict. The alternative that is better for one person is worse for some other. A second key element is costly participation. The costs of political participation may be as low as the op- portunity cost of voting on an issue about which one is already well-in- formed, or as high as public defiance of a regime known to execute dissi- dents.

Third, there is repeated interaction, which means that decisions today take into account how others will react in the future. The anticipation of future rewards and punishments drives ideological cooperation in the Game of Politics, just as it can drive cooperation in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Finally, numbers matter. Consider two examples. First, suppose we use direct majority voting to make policy decisions, and everybody votes. Sup- pose that 95% of the population has a very slight preference for policy A, and 5% has a very strong preference for policy B. (In this example it doesn't matter whether these preferences arise from interest or something else.) Al- ternative A will be chosen because a greater number of people prefer it, even though they may be on the border of indifference. It is the number of people in favor of the policy that matters, not the intensity of (or the reasons for) their preference.

A second example highlights my claim about the political role of ideology. Suppose now that Group 1 is 5% of the population and is made substantively better off by alternative A. Group 2 is 10% of the population and is made worse off by alternative A. The remaining 85% are unaffected by the choice but believe nonetheless that alternative A is better than alternative B. In this example, the decisive group will be motivated by something other than direct self-interest.

These examples illustrate how numbers matter in the setting in which they matter exclusively, that is, when policy decisions are made by voting. Indeed, they are quite similar to the examples used by Dahl (1956) in his discussion of majority voting as the basis of democracy. A significant feature of


majority voting as a social choice mechanism is that intensity of individual preference plays almost no role. This means that any person who wants to bring about a policy change must have allies-her own intensity of preference is insufficient.

Intensity of preference matters little in voting because the set of actions that individuals can take is quite limited. Although I may care about an issue ten times more than you do, I don't get ten times as many votes. In many other political contexts, however, the set of possible actions is much larger. We can express intensity of preference by contributing more or less money to a campaign, by demonstrating in a more or less disruptive fashion, by de- voting more or less effort to our cause. That is, as we move away from the abstract voting scenario, it ceases to be the case that numbers matter exclusively. More intense activity by a small group may sometimes be as effective as less intense activity by a large one. But the value of numbers never disap- pears completely.7 Indeed, when people express intense preferences through political activities besides voting, much of what they do (work on cam- paigns, organize strikes, mobilize for a town meeting, etc.) is aimed at re- cruiting allies.

The point of this brief digression has simply been that the formation of coalitions (building allies, increasing numbers) is a part of all politics-not just democratic politics, not just the politics of voting. Ideology obviously matters in both democracies and nondemocracies, and I want to argue that the coalition-forging feature of ideology applies in both settings. That said, I must now warn the reader that the Game of Politics, to which I turn now, fo- cuses on the simplest case in which only numbers matter, that is, the politics of majority voting. This is the case in which the logic of coalition formation stands out most clearly. But the basic conclusions apply as well to more complicated cases in which numbers matter along with other factors.

The Game of Politics is played as follows. Persons 1, 2, and 3 meet each period to decide whether a public project should be undertaken. In each period t, the project in question gives benefits B to one of the three players, each with equal probability, and imposes costs Ct on one of the other players, each with equal probability. This means that in each period, one person will be the beneficiary, one person will pay costs, and one person will be unaffected. "Projects" are to be construed broadly: they can be as direct as transfers of income from one person to another or as indirect as the estab- lishment of property rights systems and other social institutions that work to the advantage of one group over another.

7This is not to say that each additional ally always has positive marginal impact, but simply that there are almost no political decisions in which the numbers are completely irrelevant.

310 Kathleen Bawn

The benefits of each project remain constant from one period to the next, but the costs vary, so that Ct is the cost of period t's project. The Ct's are independent and drawn from a uniform distribution on (0,2B). This means that, in the best case, projects entail no costs; in the worst, costs are twice benefits, and, on average, costs equal benefits.

Each player can take one of three actions with regard to each period's project: abstain, support or oppose. In order to participate (to either support or oppose) the player must pay cost v, which is small relative to B. Abstention is costless. The players find out the identity of the beneficiary and cost-payer and the realized value of Ct before they decide whether and how to participate. Participation decisions are made simultaneously, so that Player 1, for example, cannot condition her decision on Player 2's action in that period.

If strictly more people support the project than oppose it, the project is adopted. Otherwise it is rejected. For example, if nobody participates, support is equal to opposition and the project fails.8

The game is repeated over an infinite horizon, with the future discounted by 0 < 3 < 1. Discount factors in repeated games can be interpreted as indicating true intertemporal preference or as the probability that the game continues into the next round, or (most commonly) both. Either interpretation boils down to uncertainty. The more uncertain the environment, the more the future is discounted relative to the present, and the lower is 3. Simi- larly, the more uncertain the environment, the lower the probability that the Game of Politics continues in the next period.

The Game of Politics is based on game of distributive politics developed by Weingast (1979) to study norms of universalism in legislature. Schwartz (1989) and Aldrich (1995) used a close variant to explain the emergence of legislative parties with essentially the logic that I am suggesting here to explain ideology. The details of these other games reflect the legislative setting: more than one project can be approved at a time (to address questions about logrolling), costs are spread equally over all players (to approximate spending from tax revenue), and voting is costless.

My choices on the latter two issues are different because I want to explore why people reveal preferences on issues in which they have no direct

8All of the paper's substantive results would hold if the tie-rule was changed (e.g., opposition must strictly exceed support for the project to fail or a coin is flipped in cases of ties). Indeed, they would hold if the decision rule was changed (e.g., support must exceed opposition by a certain mar- gin for the project to be adopted.) These sorts of changes would, however, affect the exact parameter values required to support different equilibria. Concretely, this means that changes in political institutions could affect whether a particular ideology is sustainable, given the political and social environment.


stake. To do so, I need players to be in the situation of being neither a cost- payer nor a beneficiary. I need participation costs so that I can interpret actions as revealed preferences. My choice to allow only one project per period, on the other hand, is made entirely for simplicity in the initial exposition. In Section 4, I will generalize the incidence of costs and benefits to allow for multiple beneficiaries and cost-payers. Using the terminology of legislative politics, my game looks more like redistributive politics (taking from one to give to another) and less like distributive politics then the Weingast-Aldrich-Schwartz models. This highlights the social conflict that makes forming coalitions advantageous. Finally, my game is somewhat more complicated because costs vary across periods. This additional com- plexity buys me some interesting results about hierarchical forms of ideological cooperation.

3. IDEOLOGY AS AN EQUILIBRIUM IN THE GAME OF POLITICS

It is useful to first discuss the equilibrium in this game played as a single shot, that is, the "stage game" equilibrium. This will be a stepping stone to discussing equilibria in the repeated game. It also represents the outcome of this stylized political interaction in a world in which direct self-interest drives all political behavior.

In the stage game equilibrium, the player who is unaffected by the project will never participate, because of participation costs v. When realized project costs (Ct) are less than participation costs, the beneficiary's equilibrium strategy is to support the project and the cost-payer's is to abstain.

When Ct > v, however, there is no Nash equilibrium in which the beneficiary and the cost-payer play pure strategies,9 but, as always, there is a mixed strategy equilibrium. Call the Nash equilibrium in the stage game N. N consists of the following strategies:

Beneficiary: When Ct < v, support with probability one. Otherwise support

with probability - , abstain with probability C Ct Ct

9To see this, observe that if the beneficiary supports and the cost-payer opposes, the decision is no project (support does not exceed opposition). The beneficiary would have done better by abstaining (outcome doesn't change and beneficiary saves v). If the beneficiary abstains and the cost- payer opposes, the decision is still no project, but the cost-payer would have done better by abstaining (outcome doesn't change and cost-payer saves v). If both abstain, the beneficiary would do better by supporting (project is adopted and beneficiary gains B - v > 0). Finally, if the beneficiary supports and the cost-payer abstains, the cost-payer would have done better by opposing (project is not adopted and cost-payer saves Ct- v > 0).

312 Kathleen Bawn

Cost-payer: When Ct < v, abstain with probability one. Otherwise, oppose with probability B v, abstain with probability vB

B

Unaffected: Abstain with probability one.

These probabilities are derived in the Appendix. At the start of the stage game, before the nature of the project is revealed, the expected pay-off to

each player is - 12 + , which is negative for the cases we are consider-

ing (v < B). Once the stage game is repeated, we have many equilibria, as the folk

theorem tells us to expect. The folk theorem does not imply, however, that in repeated games anything can happen, anytime. Any equilibrium will be con- tingent on the discount factor being sufficiently high relative to B and v. This means that an equilibrium can be destroyed by a small change in the environment if that change takes a parameter across a critical value.10

Consider the following strategy profile, R, for the repeated game:

All Players: If Players 1 and 2 have played Ri in the past, play Ri in this round. Otherwise revert to N (the stage game equilibrium strategy).

where

Rl: and R2: Support any project that gives benefits to Player 1 or Player 2. Op- pose any project that gives benefits to Player 3.

R3: Abstain always.

In equilibrium R, Players 1 and 2 behave as a coalition, supporting each other's projects and opposing those of Player 3. All projects benefitting Players 1 and 2 are adopted and all projects benefitting Player 3 are de- feated. Moreover, Player 1 and 2 always vote together, despite having no short-term common interest. Table 1 shows the working of equilibrium R in a little more detail.

At the beginning of each round, before the identity of beneficiary and

cost-payer are known, the expected pay-offs from R are - - v for Players 1 DB 6

and 2 and B for Player 3. Given B > v, Player 3 does worse under R than 3

if all players played N each period. Players 1 and 2 do better, as long as the

10See Calvert (1998) for an elaboration of this point.


Table 1. Equilibrium R

Condition Cooperative Action Pay-off

Beneficiary Cost-Payer 1 2 3 1 2 3

1 2 Support Support Abstain B-v -B-v 0 1 3 Support Support Abstain B-v -v -B 2 1 Support Support Abstain -B-v B-v 0 2 3 Support Support Abstain -v B-v -B 3 1 Oppose Oppose Abstain -v -v 0 3 2 Oppose Oppose Abstain -v -v 0

benefits from political decisions are sufficiently large relative to participation costs (B > 5. lv).

R is an equilibrium as long as

24B2 26B2 - 1OBv - v2

Other things equal, Equation 1 holds when B and 6 are large and v is low. (The critical value of 6 is derived in the Appendix.) Concretely, the behavior prescribed by R is most likely to persist when participation costs are low, benefits of projects are high, and the future is important.'1

A social scientist who observed R being played might make one of the following conclusions.

"Persons 1 and 2 identify with each other. They are part of a cohesive social group. Group identification drives their political decisions."

"Persons 1 and 2 feel empathy towards each other."

"Persons 1 and 2 subscribe to the same ideology."

Specifically, the social scientist would observe two behavior patterns that could not be attributed to interest. First, Player 1 would apparently care about issues that have no effect on her own welfare. That is, she would support Player 2's projects. Second, Player 1 would act against her own interest

1 1All examples in this paper use permanent reversion to the stage game equilibrium as punishment for failure to cooperate. This is done to keep things simple. Clearly, other types of punishment (e.g. temporary stage game reversions as in Green and Porter 1984) could also support ideological behavior.

314 Kathleen Bawn

in the cases where the project benefited Player 2 and imposed costs on herself. Observing Player 1 participating when Player 2 benefits and Player 3 pays costs, we might conclude that ideology motivated Player 1 to care about something that she otherwise would not. Observing Player 1 supporting projects for which she paid the costs, we might conclude that ideology overcame interest.

Of course, R is only one of many equilibria that can occur. In general, any kind of equilibrium in which self-sacrificing behavior is enforced by the expectation of long-term reciprocity requires that future gains from cooperation loom large relative to short-term temptations. That is, given a set of parameter values (B, v, and 6), some long-term cooperation patterns will be available as equilibria and others will not. Looking at the matter another way, the type of ideology that might arise depends on the features of the environment that the parameters capture-potential costs and benefits of political decisions, costs of participation, and uncertainty about the future.

Relative to other equilibria, R is characterized by the following five properties. It is inefficient, high commitment, individualistic, nonhierarchi- cal, and exclusionary. I will briefly discuss each property and give examples of other equilibria that do not display the property.

Efficiency: R is inefficient because Players 1 and 2 could do better if they economized on participation costs. It is not necessary for both Players 1 and 2 to oppose projects benefiting 3, for example. Let R' consist of the same strategies as R except that Persons 1 and 2 each abstain on projects that benefit 3 and impose costs on their ally. R' gives the same outcomes as R, but with lower participation costs and therefore higher net pay-offs. Thus, R'remains an equilibrium under less demanding conditions than R, as shown in Table 2.

Commitment: R is a high commitment equilibrium, in the sense that the cooperative strategy requires its subscribers to do something other than follow short-term self-interest in every situation. 12 Again, this is not a property of all equilibria. In Equilibrium S, Players 1 and 2 support each other's projects when Player 3 pays the costs and refrains from supporting their own projects when the costs would be borne by the other. When a project benefits Player 3, however, Players 1 and 2 behave as in the stage game equilibrium. Ideology S thus requires subscribers to help their allies when costs fall on outsiders and to avoid imposing costs on allies, but does not demand that subscribers take any action when outsiders threaten to impose costs on the ally. S demands behavior different from short-term self-interest in some situ- ations but not others, thus involving less commitment than R.

12I am using the word "commitment" to describe a property of the ideology, namely how much its prescribed actions depart from short-term self-interest (stage game equilibrium). This is somewhat different from the ordinary use of the word to describe a property of a person, namely how closely the person's own behavior matches the ideological model.


Table 2. Parameters Values Necessary to Support Game of Politics Equilibria

Individual Rationality Equilibrium Minimum

Equilibrium Requirement Requirement B = 1, v = .01

R B > 5.1v 6 > 24B2 .927 26B2 - 1OBv - v2

24B2 R' B > 3.15v 3 > 26B2 - 18Bv- v2 .925

24B 2 - 24Bv S B > 2.12v > 28B _3B-2 .858

28B2 -32Bv- V285

24B 2 T B > 2.56v >29B2 12B22 .831

U B>v ~~~~~~~12B2 - 2Bv U B > v (5 > 13B2 - 2Bv - V2 .922

V: Person 1 B > 13.21vl 61 > 48B2 .982 49B2 - 13Bv - 2V2

Person 2 B > 1.82V2 452 > 2 96B2 127B2 - 52Bv - 2v2

It is useful to consider some real world ideologies that create similar coalitions, but that differ in the degree of commitment as defined here. One example would be revolutionary versus "evolutionary" socialism. Consider Lenin's (1917) attack on Kautsky. While similar in requirements about who is to be cooperated with, the ideology espoused by Lenin demanded a higher commitment than that espoused by Kautsky. Another example would be varying degrees of feminism. Low commitment versions require support for abortion rights, equal pay, maternity leave and daycare, even by women who themselves would not be affected. A higher-commitment feminist ideology might also require expending some effort to patronize businesses owned by women. An even higher-commitment version might demand complete separatism.

Individual versus group orientation: In the equilibria discussed so far, the prescribed actions depended only on the identities of those helped and hurt by the project. In this sense, the ideologies are individualistic. The link between these equilibria and real-world ideologies may seem weak for two reasons. First, the demands of real world ideologies are generally much more complicated, demanding different degrees of cooperation in different circumstances. Second, many ideologies in the real world explicitly reject

316 Kathleen Bawn

individualistic frameworks and emphasize group consciousness of various forms (class, race, gender).

But consider Equilibrium T in which Players 1 and 2 support each others' projects only if the net benefits to 1 and 2 as a group exceed costs. That is, Players 1 and 2 always support each other's projects when Player 3 pays the costs. But when Player 1 benefits at the expense of Player 2 (or vice versa) they only support the project if Ct < B. By requiring subscribers to consider group benefits (rather than individual benefits), T offers its subscribers a higher expected pay-off than R or R'.

Exclusionary versus universal cooperation: All of the equilibria discussed so far are exclusionary in the sense that Player 3 is excluded from the benefits of cooperation. Exclusionary ideologies create a sense of "Us" and "Them" for the players who subscribe to them. Exclusion is not inevitable, however. In Equilibrium U, the cooperative strategy is for each player to support projects for which he is the beneficiary whenever project costs are less than benefits. In all other cases, the players abstain. No player is excluded from the benefits of cooperation. This equilibrium can be thought of as implementing the utilitarian ideology that underlies most economic policy analysis.13 Projects pass if social costs (added up across all members of society) are less than social benefits.

Ideologies that create universal coalitions will necessarily offer lower long-term benefits from cooperation and will, therefore, be harder to sustain than those that create similar forms of cooperation but that are exclusionary. The relevant comparison in Table 2 would be to Equilibrium T, which like U, regulates behavior based on group benefits. The notion that universalist ideologies are hard to sustain is consistent with Hardin's (1997) argument that norms of exclusion are more robust than universalist norms and with empirical results from social psychology that suggest that the formation of exclusionary groups is fundamental to human nature (Tajfel 1970).

Hierarchical groups: Group-oriented ideologies often generate vigorous internal debates over how group interest is defined. Who is the proletariat, really? What are the interests of women or African-Americans? What does it mean to be a Zionist? In T, group interest was defined by comparing group benefits to group costs, with all group members receiving equal weight. But alternative definitions of group interest are possible and, like other aspects of ideology, will work to the advantage of some players and the disadvantage of others. For example, Equilibrium V gives Player 2 twice as much weight

13This is not to imply that real world ideologies that use utilitarian rhetoric, such as laissez faire capitalism, create universal coalitions. The real world variants of utilitarian ideologies tend to create coalitions that exclude or give low weight to individuals who bear the costs of market failures such as externalities, nonconvexities, and incomplete information.


as Player 1 so that projects that benefit Player 1 at the expense of Player 2 are supported by the coalition only if the ratio of benefits to costs is at least 2. Projects that benefit Player 2 at the expense of Player 1, conversely, are supported if the benefit-cost ratio is at least 0.5.

The point here is that ideologies not only define "us" and "them," they can also deem some of "us" more important than others. Ideology not only determines who is in a coalition with whom, but also who benefits the most from coalitional cooperation.

So far, the Game of Politics has accomplished three things. It has given us a theory of how ideology can arise from short-term self-interest, given repeated interaction and the value of allies. When numbers matter, it pays to form coalitions, and different coalitions will be advantageous to different individuals.

Second, it has shown the wide variety of outcomes that can result from ideological behavior. Ideologies can entail high commitments, regulating actions in all political encounters, or they can be undemanding, allowing subscribers to pursue short-term self-interest much of the time and requiring cooperation only special circumstances. Ideologies can be inclusive or exclusive. They can give more or less weight to the welfare of different coalition members.

Finally, the model has given us a theory of when ideologies should fail. An equilibrium ideology will be self-enforcing unless key parameter values change so that the minimum discount factor threshold is no longer met.14 That is, an ideology is likely to fail if the benefits of political activity fall, the costs rise, the costs of participation rise, or if the future grows more uncertain.15 For example, any sort of ideological behavior is easier to sustain among people whose position in society is fairly secure, since they will have higher discount factors. This prediction is roughly consistent with Marx's ([1852] 1963) observations that the lumpenproletariat, i.e., those in the most desperate and uncertain straits, cannot be relied upon to behave in ways other than to pursue immediate self-interest.

141n principle, one could include the probability that parameters change explicitly in the model. This would complicate matters a great deal, without adding much to the analysis. I prefer to consider uncertainty about a changing political and social environment as built into the discount rate.

150ne clear prediction from the Game of Politics is that when the discount factor falls, an ideological equilibrium becomes more fragile. In times of extreme uncertainty and social upheaval, then, existing ideologies should be most likely to fail. This prediction may at first seem at odds with reality; social upheaval often seems to be associated with more rather than less ideological behavior. In many cases, however, the ideological behavior stands out because it is "revolutionary"-novel in terms of the coalition it forges. Even ideological behavior that purports to defend a status quo often reflects quite different codes of behavior then were displayed before the upheaval. This framework's prediction is that social unrest (and other forms of uncertainty) should lead to the failure of old ideologies and the appearance of new ones.

318 Kathleen Bawn

4. THE GAME OF IDEOLOGY

We are now in a position to consider why some ideological coalitions form and others do not. The previous section showed that the nature of the Game of Politics equilibrium determines society's big winners (here, Per- sons 1 and 2) and losers (Person 3). Because the process of selecting an equilibrium has high stakes, there is a strong incentive for the players to try to promote ideologies that include themselves among the beneficiaries. The premise of the Game of Ideology is that some members of society can affect the salience of different ideologies-by writing manifestoes, giving speeches, leading social movements, and so on. The Game of Ideology is a model of how this happens, how new ideologies are put forth, and how they succeed or fail. The argument is that players propose ideologies to strategically maximize pay-offs in the Game of Politics, subject to the constraints of coalition politics.

I can use the results of the Game of Politics to define the value of an ideology as the difference between the expected pay-offs from its associated equilibrium and those from playing the stage game equilibrium in every round. Table 3 shows the per-round values of the six ideologies discussed so far. There are two points to note. First, a wide range of values is possible, demonstrating again that the players' long-term welfare is greatly affected by which ideology operates. Second, at some point, the total gains from ideological cooperation are limited by the resources of society. Once participation and monitoring costs are allocated efficiently, the only way to increase the pay-off of one coalition member is to increase the weight that her individual benefits and costs receive relative to her ally's.

If we can understand ideologies as coalitions, perhaps we can also understand the origin of ideologies by using existing theories of coalition formation. Particularly promising for my purpose here is the sequential choice approach, which uses noncooperative game theory to predict the outcome of coalitional bargaining (Baron 1989, 1991, 1994; Baron and Ferejohn 1989). Unlike other approaches to the study of coalitions (e.g., social choice theory and cooperative game theory), sequential choice theory gives precise predictions about the outcome of coalitional bargaining processes and is thus con- ducive to generating comparative statics.

The following sequential choice model of the Game of Ideology builds on Baron and Ferejohn's (1989) model of the formation of legislative coalitions. Three players meet to make a collective decision about what ideology to adopt, that is, what equilibrium to play in future rounds of the Game of Politics.16 In each round of the Game of Ideology, one player is chosen at

16My separation of the Game of Ideology from the Game of Politics is artificial, but simplifies the analysis considerably. A similar separation of the Game of Life and the Game of Morals is used to good effect in Binmore (1994).


Table 3. Per-round Value of Ideologies

Panel (a): Values as a function of parameters

Equilibrium Player 1 Player 2 Player 3

2B2 2-lOBv _v2 2B2 2-lOBv _v2 - 4B2 + 2Bv -v2 R

12B 12B 12B

2B2 -6Bv -v2 2B2 -6Bv - v2 - 4B2 + 2Bv -v2 R'

12B 12B 12B

4 B2 _8Bv - v2 4B2 _8Bv - v2 _4B2 +4Bv - v2 S

24B 24B 12B

5B2- 12Bv - 2v2 5B2- 12Bv - 2v2 - 4B2 + 2Bv -v2 T

24B 24B 12B

B 2_V2 B 2_V2 B 2_V2 U~~~~B -_ U 12B 12B 12B

4B2 - 13Bv - 2v2 31B2 - 52Bv -8v2 - 4B2 + 2Bv -v2 V

24B 96B 12B

Panel (b) Numeric Example

B = 1, v = .01

Equilibrium Player 1 Player 2 Player 3

R .158 .158 -.332 R' .162 .162 -.332 S .164 .164 -.330 T .203 .203 -.332 U .083 .083 .083 V .036 .317 -.332

Note: For both panels, the long-term values of the ideologies are these per-round values multiplied by 1/1 - &.

random to propose an ideology. The choice set is large, containing all of the available equilibria in the Game of Politics. Each of the other players evalu- ates the proposed ideology in terms of the pay-offs it will produce in the Game of Politics and then decides whether to support it or not. If the proposal gains the support of a majority, it is implemented. If not, we go to the next round, which is identical to the first: again a player is chosen at random to make a proposal, others decide to support it or not, etc. Players discount pay-offs in future periods by 0 < 6 < 1.

As noted above, once we allocate participation costs efficiently, an ideology that offers higher benefits to one player necessarily offers lower ben-

320 Kathleen Bawn

efits to at least one other player. This means that we can think about the total available benefits from ideological cooperation as a pie of fixed size and can think about ideologies simply in terms of the fraction of the pie allocated to each player. Thus, when deciding whether or not to support a proposed ideology, each player compares her proposed share of the Game of Politics pie to her expected value from continuing in the Game of Ideology. The player proposing the ideology wants to maximize his own pie slice, but realizes that he needs to give at least one other player a slice large enough to win her support. In equilibrium, the game will end in the first round, with one of the other players offered a share of the pie equal to the expected value of continuing the game, or "continuation value."

So far, the Game of Ideology is structurally identical to the simplest game studied by Baron and Ferejohn (1989), in which three players bargain over a dollar. The only difference is that here the "dollar" represents the total available gains from ideological cooperation. The specific questions that Baron and Ferejohn pursue (e.g., size of coalition, effect of open rule) are most appropriate for studying formal legislative coalitions. I will now alter their basic model to shift the focus to the relationship between interest and ideology by looking that the effect of natural alliances.

Define a natural alliance as follows. Persons ] and 2 are natural allies if the total long-term stream of benefits they gain from cooperating with each other is greater than what either would gain from cooperating with Person 3.

In the basic version of the Game of Politics discussed above, there were no "natural" alliances, in part because there was no short-term common interest. Real political interaction is rarely so symmetric, however. A more re- alistic version of the Game of Politics would allow for positive and negative externalities, that is, for projects to impose benefits and costs on more than one person. Once we allow for externalities, it is reasonable to think that individual benefits and costs may be correlated. If you and I live in the same area, a road that benefits you is likely to benefit me. If we buy and sell in the same markets, an exchange rate policy that benefits you will also benefit me. If we are similarly endowed with resources, a property rights system that benefits you will also benefit me.

In these examples, natural alliances result from high probabilities of positive externalities. They can also result from relatively low probabilities of negative externalities. That is, if projects that benefit Person 1 are more likely to impose costs on Person 3 than on Person 2, 1 and 2 will be natural allies. Concretely, natural alliances can arise because of common enemies. Arguably, the coalition forged by Progressivism in the early twentieth cen- tury was based on a natural alliance of very different groups united by the common desire for reforms that were opposed by the prevailing party ma- chines (McCormick 1986).


Finally, natural alliances can arise from advantages in monitoring. A richer model of the Game of Politics would encompass the problem of veri- fying that ideological behavior is adhered to. I will return to this issue below in the discussion of symbolic action. For the moment, it should be clear that the benefits from ideological cooperation are higher if the ideology's subscribers can cheaply verify that their co-ideologues are not trying to cheat. People who live near each other, speak the same language, are members of the same ethnic group, and/or share a common cultural heritage are likely to enjoy natural advantages in monitoring (Greif 1989; Fearon and Laitin 1996). Natural advantages in monitoring can also arise from institutions. Anderson (1991) argues that the coalitions defined by nationalist ideologies in the New World often followed the borders of colonial administrative units because this existing structure made for efficient monitoring.

The key feature of natural alliances is that they reflect physical circumstances and economic fundamentals. They do not depend on what equilibrium is played in the Game of Politics. Natural alliances are different from ideological alliances, which reflect the gains from forming a coalition in Game of Politics and are entirely dependent on the nature of the equilibrium. If we have natural common interest, we find ourselves benefitting from similar policies even if we are ideological enemies.

How does the presence of natural alliances affect the outcome of the Game of Ideology? An ideological coalition that incorporates a natural alliance will enjoy greater long-term benefits than one that cuts across natural alliances. If ideologies are constructed to maximize benefits in the Game of Politics, it would seem that those based on natural alliances would be advantaged. Ideologies that cut across natural alliances can be thought of as embodying "false consciousness" in the sense some subscribers would do better if their ideologically-induced preferences put them in a coalition with their natural allies.

Returning to the sequential choice model, we can now explore when and how ideologies based on false consciousness can succeed. For the pur- poses of the model, a natural alliance between Players 1 and 2 means that the pie is larger when only 1 and 2 are included in the division. Let any ideological coalition that includes Player 3 (a coalition of 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, or a universal coalition) split a pie of size 1, and any coalition that does not include 3 split a pie of size p > 1. 17

17Calvert and Dietz (1996) develop a sequential bargaining model with externalities that could be interpreted as common interest. Their formalization of common interest is done, however, in the context of spatial preferences rather than a divide-the-pie game. The spatial model is useful for the question they address, namely the formation of parties and voting coalitions in legislatures. But because it presumes that preferences are already defined on all dimensions, the spatial model strikes me as inappropriate for a model in which ideology is endogenous.

322 Kathleen Bawn

The following result, proved in the Appendix, shows that the effect of a natural alliance in the Game of Ideology depends on just how natural it is, that is, on how much Persons 1 and 2 benefit by cooperating with each other instead of Person 3. 18

RESULT: When a natural alliance of magnitude (p exists between Players 1 and 2, the stationary equilibrium depends on the size of (p relative to the discount rate. There are three cases.

CASE A: When the magnitude of the natural alliance is small

< 18- 9 +82 ), the stationary equilibrium consists of the following K18 -96 -282)

strategies.

Players ] and 2: When recognized, propose an ideology that includes the natu-

ral ally with probability r = Io - - and offer the ally 26 YA

YA =-b + (b2 - 720(Qp - 1)) (2)

where b = 9(1 - 4) - 6(2 + 4). Propose an ideology that excludes the natural ally and includes Player 3 with probability 1 - r and offer 3 y7 = 7- A + 1. When not recognized, support any ideology which offers at least YA*

Player 3: When recognized, include Player 1 or Player 2 with equal probability and offer YA as given by Equation 2. Support any proposal that offers at least YA*

CASE B: When the magnitude of the natural alliance is in an intermediate

range 18 - 95 - 252 < < 6

-) the stationary equilibrium is:

Players 1 and 2: When recognized, always propose an ideology that includes

the natural ally. Offer the ally YB = 6 2 . When not recognized, support any

ideology which offers at least YB

18As is generally done in sequential choice models, I will restrict attention to stationary equilibria, that is, those in which players make identical choices in identical subgames. Baron and Ferejohn (1989) discuss the stationarity restriction in some detail. The unique stationary equilibrium constitutes the model's empirical prediction as to what ideological coalition will form in the presence of a natural alliance.


Player 3: When recognized, include Player 1 or Player 2 with equal probabil-

ity and offer YB Support any proposal that offers at least I- 6 _

CASE C: When the magnitude of the natural alliance is large ( 6 < the stationary equilibrium is:

Players ] and 2: When recognized, always propose an ideology that includes

the natural ally. Offer the ally y = 3 . When not recognized, support any

ideology which offers at least yc.

Player 3: Do not make a proposal when recognized. Support any proposal that offers a positive pay-off.

Substantively, as the magnitude of the natural alliance grows, the likelihood that a successful ideology incorporates this alliance grows. In Case A, the magnitude of the alliance is modest. That is, the advantage to 1 and 2 of allying with each other rather than with 3 is small. In this case, the members of the natural alliance will sometimes include the non-ally in their ideological coalition. The fact that player 1, for example, includes non-ally 3 with some positive probability reduces player 2's continuation value and allows 1 to win 2's support with a smaller slice of the pie.

As the magnitude of the natural alliance increases (Case B), the advantage of keeping one's natural ally on her toes (by a willingness to form a coalition with the non-ally) diminishes relative to the advantage of splitting a larger pie. When (p is in the range covered by Case B, ideologies cement the natural alliance whenever one of the natural allies is able to make a proposal.

In both Cases A and B, when Player 3 (the non-ally) has the chance to propose an ideology, he includes either Player I or 2 in his ideological coalition, each with probability 0.5. When the magnitude of the natural alliance is extremely large, however, there is no ideology that Player 3 can propose that Players 1 or 2 would be willing to support. Even if Player 3 gave away the entire pie of size 1, Players 1 and 2 do better by splitting the larger pie of size (p.

Table 4 shows how the probability that a natural alliance is reflected in an ideological coalition varies with the magnitude of the alliance ((p) and the discount factor (5). The Table highlights two important implications of this section's result. First, it shows that ideologies can run counter to natural alliances-provided that the natural common interest is not too overwhelming.

324 Kathleen Bawn

Table 4. Likelihood That Ideology Reflects Common Interest

Probability that Ideology reflects natural alliance Magnitude of Natural Alliance (Conditional on discount factor 6)

6= 0.90 6 = 0.75 6 = 0.50

(p=1.01 .340 .353 .387 1.05 .387 .427 .620 1.1 .442 .527 .667 1.5 .667 .667 .667 2 .667 .667 .667 5 1 1 .667

10 1 1 1

As the natural common interest grows larger, however, it becomes increas- ingly likely that it will be reflected in ideology.

The second implication is the other side of the story. If there is a very large natural alliance between two players, ideologies will reflect this alliance with probability one. In such a case (Case C), the non-ally will be completely marginalized and unable to participate in ideological debate.

We can interpret the result as defining the limits of false consciousness. If we believe that (a) objective common interest exists and (b) ideologies arise out of political bargaining, then the result tells us that interest is relevant to predicting the composition of ideological coalitions, but that it is not the whole story. The possibility of false consciousness implies that we cannot predict ideology entirely on the basis of common interest.

5. DisCUSSION: BACK TOWARD REALITY Having stated the paper's main result, I now discuss two potential prob-

lems. First, doesn't the Game of Ideology imply that ideologies should always be efficient, in the sense of never requiring subscribers to take actions that are not decisive in affecting outcomes? Second, by adapting models of institutions to explain ideology, am I equating these two things?

5.1 Efficiency and "Symbolic" Action Although I showed above that inefficient equilibria can be sustained, the

Game of Ideology implies that they will not be proposed. Recall that inefficient ideologies are those in which at least one person is required to "waste" some participation effort by taking actions that do not change outcomes. In the Game of Ideology, this would be equivalent to a proposal that throws away part of the pie. In ordinary language, inefficient ideologies are ones that require (or otherwise motivate) what we might call "symbolic" activities.


This category includes activities advocating clear lost causes-a candle-light vigil to protest the death penalty in present-day Texas, for example. It also includes activities whose impact on any policy change is quite weak, such as the self-conscious use of (or refusal to use) female pronouns in contemporary prose.

My version of the Game of Ideology predicts that inefficient ideologies will never be proposed. The prediction is theoretically quite robust: it is hard to imagine any reasonable change to the basic bargaining model that would change it. But much behavior that we ordinarily consider ideological has this kind of symbolic quality. One possible explanation is that these activities are motivated by expressive benefits. If so, these benefits could be integrated into the Game of Politics, along the lines of Chong's (1991) study of the civil rights movement or Schuessler's (1997) analysis of electoral turn-out. Schuessler's model of expressive voting seems particularly close to my model of ideology, in that both are based on notions of group membership.

Another possibility is that a richer model of the Game of Politics could reconcile seemingly symbolic activities with instrumental rationality. While it seems fairly clear that expressive benefits are linked in a significant way to ideology, it is less clear whether they are better thought of as cause or effect. Is the desire to express one's "Being" (the term Schuessler uses) an exog- enous force that interacts with the other incentives to form ideological and identity-based coalitions? Or does it arise from the logic of coalition formation as part of the endogenous phenomenon of ideology? Along the latter lines, Hardin's (1997) analysis of norms of exclusion argues that behavior that seems symbolic or destructive (dueling is a prominent example) can be understood as ways of generating public signals of group membership. Hardin offers several reasons why group membership might be valuable, including the one I have pursued here, the value of allies in political decisions, and others that I have not, such as positive externalities in consumption.

The Game of Politics could be enriched to incorporate Hardin's logic of group membership by adding uncertainty about group membership and problems in monitoring.'9 Suppose that you and I both subscribe to an ideology that requires us to support each other's projects. But suppose further that you are not quite sure whether I am in your coalition. (I claim to be

191f the goal is to clarify the relationship of symbolic activity to an instrumentalist theory of ideology, it would be wise to allow for the possibility that the beneficiary and cost-payer in the Game of Politics are the same person. Some ideologies-particularly those that are part of religious identities-do make prescriptions about decisions that would seem to affect only one person (the decision to follow kosher dietary restrictions, for example.) The requirements would seem to fit Hardin's interpretation of norms of exclusion. That is, these requirements may serve as observable cues as to who is and who is not a member of the group.

326 Kathleen Bawn

ordinary folk but might I not be a part of the privileged elite?) Perhaps you are not sure whether I have cooperated in the past. (I claim to have supported feminist causes but have I really?) Patterns of participation that seem waste- ful in the simple, full-information Game of Politics may turn out in a richer model to increase efficiency by reducing monitoring costs.

These extensions are beyond the scope of this particular paper, but they point in a promising direction. The point here is simply that a richer model of the Game of Politics might give us a much different perspective what is and is not an efficient ideology, what is and is not symbolic activity.20 It is also likely to give us a better vantage point from which to identify natural alliances.

5.2 One Analogy, Two Applications: Ideologies and Institutions A second issue about which readers might be skeptical is whether I can

borrow so liberally from models of institutions to study something like ideology. Aren't ideology and institutions very different things?

Institutions form the rules of political interaction and structure the incentives of individuals. They are not preferences. Ideologies, as I have defined them here, are patterns of behavior that we can interpret as revealed preferences. It would be a mistake to blur the distinction between these two things. But I do want to argue that they are solutions, perhaps partial solutions, to the same basic problem: the uncertainty of coalition politics. The logic of coalition formation creates uncertainty about who will be included and who will be excluded in winning coalitions. This uncertainty, illustrated in a simple way in the Game of Politics, stems directly from the inherent instability of social choice mechanisms in which numbers matter (Arrow 1953).

The instability of social choices means that individuals who form a winning coalition at one point in time have an incentive to increase the chance that the same coalition forms in the future. One way to do this is by creating appropriate institutions. McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (1989) argue that the institutions of policy implementation are constructed to "freeze" the legislative coalitions that created them. Aldrich (1995) and Schwartz (1989) argue that the institutions of political parties are created to "lengthen" the lives of coalitions. Long coalitions, in this sense, are identical to the various coop-

20Along similar lines, incorporating uncertainty into the Game of Politics might change the current Game of Ideology's prediction that only minimum winning coalitions (MWC's) form. While Riker's seminal book on coalition theory (1962) predicts only MWC's, this prediction has not held up empirically (Laver and Schofield 1990). This paper's MWC prediction is not at all robust-several reasonable changes to the Game of Ideology within the sequential choice framework would predict oversized coalitions (Baron and Ferejohn 1989). For this reason, I do not make much of the MWC prediction here.


erative equilibria in the Game of Politics. By emphasizing the requirement that long coalitions result from self-reinforcing behavior, I reinterpret long coalitions as ideologies rather than parties.

If I am right, are Aldrich and Schwartz wrong? If long coalitions are ideologies, does that mean they cannot be parties? Not necessarily. It seems quite likely that both ideologies and parties perform the function of freezing coalitions. But the way that they perform this function is different: ideology by specifying a pattern of self-reinforcing behavior and parties by creating an institution with a valuable ongoing reputation and with the ability to re- ward and punish its members. This means that, even if we use the same logic to understand both parties and ideologies, we will derive different empirical predictions about when each will fail. An ideology will fail when the net value of future coalitional cooperation falls relative to the discount factor of its subscribers. A party will fail when its reputation ceases to be of value or when it can no longer offer meaningful rewards and punishments.21

In reality, most (but not all) political parties are associated with ideologies and most (but again not all) ideologies give rise to some sort of institution, in many cases a party. A reasonable conjecture is that ideologies and institutions are often complements (Garrett and Weingast 1993). An advantage of institutions over ideology as a way of freezing coalition is that they are harder to change and thus more robust in the face of changing environment. An advantage of ideology is that it is less likely to work against those who established it (see Horn and Shepsle 1989).

The point here is that a single idea or analogy can apply to more than one real world phenomenon (McCubbins and Thies 1997). To make an analogy about analogies, consider the various phenomena to which the single basic idea of natural selection has been applied: profit maximizing behavior by firms (firms that don't maximize are competed out of the market) and re- election maximizing behavior by politicians (those who don't maximize fail to return to office). Not to mention the origin of species! The fact that com- petition and selection can form the basis of a model of interaction in a market does not mean that they cannot form the basis of a model of legislative

21lf equilibrium coalitions in the Game of Politics can be interpreted as parties as well as ideologies, can we think of parties as arising from the sort of bargaining portrayed in the Game of Ide- ology? Again, the answer is likely to be yes. The same basic logic may well apply, but the way in which the model maps into reality and the ways we would test it would be different. The set of people in the real world who can be thought of as playing the Game of Ideology is different (presum- ably larger) than the set of people who participate in the strategic bargaining that begets parties. The details of the rules may be different (e.g., recognition probabilities, existence of a reversion point). Most importantly, there may be differences in what constitutes a natural alliance. The nature of electoral systems clearly affects the nature of the coalitions that constitute parties (Duverger 1953; Cox 1997) much more than it affects the coalitions that form ideologies

328 Kathleen Bawn

behavior. But neither does it mean that the logic of how selection works through markets is identical to how it works through elections. In the same way, the logic of coalition formation can apply to both party and ideology, but in ways that entail meaningful differences.

6. CONCLUSION: TOWARD A THEORY OF SALIENCE My goal here was to advance a theoretical framework for thinking about

ideology and to offer some preliminary results. I demonstrated that the framework is general enough to address a large set of questions about the relationship between ideology and interest. I emphasized the flexibility of the framework and the potentially large number of free parameters to show that comparative statics can be generated in a wide variety of ways. At this level of discussion, the reader may wonder if the model is too general to be falsified. But in any given context, only a small number of comparative static thought experiments make sense. An effective empirical test would thus choose a context that would hold many parameters constant and test a small number of comparative static predictions.

I have tried to understand ideology using models and analogies that have been previously applied to institutions. This has not been to argue that ideologies are weak forms of institution, but rather that the underlying logic of coalition formation applies to both in ways that are similar, but not identical. In exploring impact of coalition logic on institutions, Riker (1980) made the often-quoted remark that institutions are "congealed" preferences. Along similar lines, my argument here is that ideologies, and the preferences they induce, are something like "congealed interests." I have tried to push Riker's analogy further by modelling the process through which the congealing of interest occurs.

The Game of Politics showed that the sort of behavior that observers would attribute to things like ideology, identity, and morals, but certainly not to self-interest, can emerge as equilibrium behavior in a model with no causal force other than self-interest. Repeated interaction and the value of allies are sufficient to make ideological behavior arise out of long-term self- interest. In one sense, then, ideology is not an independent causal force, but simply the net effect of interest and the structure of political interaction. In the same sense, the task of ideology is equilibrium selection, nothing more. But the stakes associated with this task are high indeed. The set of available equilibria in the Game of Politics is so large that the force that selects one has everything to do with who wins and who loses from political decisions.

These high stakes beg a theory of equilibrium selection, and the Game of Ideology offered one. The basic claim developed there is that the success of small number of ideologies and the failure of countless others (i.e., the salience of small number of equilibria and the nonsalience of countless others) can be explained in terms of strategic elites who construct them, mind-


ful of the gains available in the Game of Politics, and of the constraining logic of coalition politics.

I chose here to derive a result about what ideologies succeed under what circumstances with natural alliances as my reference point. While this is not the only way to approach the question, it is a natural starting place, given that my framework is one in which interest is the driving force. The result proved in Section 4 defines a middle ground between two common, but extreme, positions about ideology. One extreme position would be that ideology is just straightforward window-dressing for interest. This position would predict all ideologies reflect the strongest natural alliance available. False consciousness could not exist, and explanations of political outcomes could safely treat ideology as epiphenomenal. The other extreme would be a pure focal points argument: the social construction of ideology is so arbitrary that there are no regularities in the relationship between ideology and interest. Anything can happen. While this extreme position is perhaps closer to the one I have taken here, I want to emphasize that mine is not a pure chaos theory of ideology. The Game of Ideology is designed to derive testable predictions about the shape of ideological coalitions.

Ideology can be understood as interest congealed by the logic of ongoing political interaction. The process of congealing is not so arbitrary to be beyond the purview of social science, but neither is it so straightforward that we can ignore it. In the short run, ideology is a powerful force in determin- ing political outcomes. In the long run, it arises from the basic logic of political life: the logic of coalition formation.

Manuscript submitted 5 March 1998. Final manuscript received 15 September 1998.

APPENDIX Stage Game Equilibrium in the Game of Politics

Suppose Player 1 is the cost-payer, Player 2 the beneficiary, and Player 3 is unaffected. Footnote 9 explains why there is no stage-game equilibrium in which 1 and 2 play pure strategies when v < Ct. To find the probabilities that define the mixed strategy equilibrium, observe that in equilibrium Player 1 must receive the same expected pay-off from each of the two strategies she plays (abstain or oppose). That is EUI(abstain) = EU1(oppose), or

-(1 - P2A)Ct = -V, (A 1)

where P2A is the probability that Person 2 abstains. Note that the value of Ct is known at the time the players make their decision. Similarly, Person 2 must be indifferent between abstaining and supporting so that

330 Kathleen Bawn

0 = plA(B - v) + (1 - P1A)(V), (A.2)

where PlA is the probability that Person 1 abstains. Solving (A. 1) for p2A and (A.2) for PlA yields the mixed strategy equilibrium probabilities given in the main body. Projects

V2 with Ct > v pass with probability B

CtB Conditional on Ct > v, the expected pay-off to the cost-payer is -v; the expected pay-

off to the beneficiary is 0. In the other case, when Ct < v, the beneficiary gets B, and the V expected pay-off to the cost-payer is - v. Before we know the value of Ct and the 2

incidence of benefits and costs, the expected pay-off to the stage game equilibrium is

V (B V 2B-v v V2 2B _-_ +__ , which reduces to --+

2B 3 6 2B 3 6 12B

Cooperative Equilibria in the Game of Politics

In order for a set of strategies to constitute an equilibrium, it must be the case that the long-run gains from cooperation outweigh the short-run gains from deviation. In the case of equilibrium R, the biggest temptation occurs when an insider, say Player 1, is required to support a project for which she bears the costs, and for which the costs take their maximum possible value, that is Ct = 2B. By opposing rather than abstaining in this case, Player 1 gains 2B in the current period. (She must pay v in either case.) Her future losses come from the difference between the expected pay-offs from cooperating

with Player 2 (on average, -- v) and the expected pay-offs from reverting to the stage 6

V V2 game equilibrium (on average, - - + ). First, note that Players 1 and 2 benefit

6 12B B v V

from playing R instead of the stage game equilibrium only if - - v > - - + 6 6 12B'

which reduces to B > 5.1v. In addition, to sustain the equilibrium, the short-term gains of defecting must be less

than the long-term gains from cooperating, so that

2B < E b 6 -6 12BI

which reduces to 8 > 24B2 . The conditions necessary to support the

26B2 - lOBv -v2

other equilibria are derived in the same way.


Stationary Equilibrium in the Game of Ideology

The proposer wants to keep as much of the pie for herself as possible, so she buys the support of only one other player. In order to get the support of another player, the proposer must offer that player at least his continuation value, his discounted expected pay-off from letting the game continue into the next round. Continuation values for the natural allies (Players 1 and 2) will be different from the continuation value of the outsider (Player 3) because of different expected pay-offs, and the equilibrium proposals will reflect the different continuation values. Define the following:

YAA = fraction of pie offered in proposal by one ally to the other

YOA = fraction of pie offered in proposal by outsider to ally YAO = fraction of pie offered in proposal by ally to outsider r = probability that one ally includes the other in her proposal VA = value of the game to ally VO = value of the game to outsider

Because the two allies are identical, when the outsider is recognized, he will include each of them in his proposal with probability 0.50. So

VA = (r y1]AA) + (I1-r)(l - YAO)) + 3rO'YAA + 6 YOA

The two allies are identical in their treatment of the outsider, so that

VO = - (1 - r)YAO + - (1 - yOA). When one ally makes a proposal to either the other 3 3

ally or to outsider, she must give each of them at least their continuation values, imply- ing that yJAA = 6VA and

YAO = V (A.3)

in the stationary equilibrium. Similarly, the outsider must give one of the allies at least her continuation value, so that yOA = 8VA.

I will first derive the conditions under which an ally sometime includes the outsider (and excludes the other ally) in her proposal. This is the case in which r ? 1 (Case A). First note that in this case, the ally who is making the proposal must be indifferent between including the other ally and including the outsider, so that

1I-7AO = o(1- YAA). (A.4)

The equilibrium conditions are satisfied when r = 2_ - 26 y and

28,yA

332 Kathleen Bawn

YAA -b + (b2- 72&80( - i)) where b = 9(1 - o) - 8(2 + o). (The equilibrium

180

-b - (b2_ 2( -) conditions are also met when yAA =

- - 728,( - i)) but this expression 180

never yields values of r and yAA in the permissible range.) These values of r and yAA must lie between 0 and 1 for there to be a stationary

equilibrium in which the allies sometimes include the outsider. That occurs whenever

18-96+52 (A.5) 18 - 96 - 262

Note that in the main body, YA, YB, and yc refers to the value of the offer the proposer makes, whereas yAA refers to the fraction of the pie implied by the offer so that AYA = = yOA This establishes Case A of the Result.

When Equation A.5 does not hold, the question is whether there is a stationary equilibrium in which each ally always includes the other, that is, in which, r = 1. If so, the value of the game to each ally would be

VA = I0(1-YA) + IO]A4 + IYOA (A.6) 3 3 6

and conditions A.3 and A.4 are no longer necessary. The remaining equilibrium condi- 26

tions and Equation A.6 imply that y = 65 . In this case, we must also verify that

neither ally can gain by including the outsider (whose continuation value is low due to the expectation of exclusion.) That is, the ally's pay-off from including the ally must be greater than her pay-off from including the outsider:

?@( 6j > I 3 6-6 O, which reduces to Equation A.5.

To finish demonstrating Case B, we need to verify that the outsider is not required to

offer an ally more than the entire pie, that is, that6 < 1. When this condition does

not hold, we are in Case C, in which the outsider always abstains. The value of the game to either ally is

VA =- (1- YAA) +- 3 ?)AA + - 5 VA 3 3 3

which, together with Ory A = 8VA,9 gives y AA While it may seem odd that


the outsider is excluded even though his support could be obtained by giving him any positive share of the pie of size 1, note that the proposer gets a pay-off greater than 1 from including her natural ally.

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