Strategy (106 page)

Part of the explanation lay in a consideration of the social costs and benefits. An individual who did not bother to vote or join a union might escape notice, whereas in a small group engaged in an active campaign this would not be the case. On this basis Olson could explain, for example, why motor manufacturers might be able to lobby together for government measures that would keep car prices up, but the more numerous consumers would not be able to act equivalently to bring prices down. Collective goods affected everyone, but they were more likely to serve the interests of those best placed to lobby for them.

Once social pressures were admitted then the questions of where interests lay became more problematic. Questions of honor and reputation had to be socially validated. They were meaningless outside of a social context, but that also meant that they could vary with context. A theory in which interests were narrowly conceived and pursued, in the form of money and power, might remain elegant and parsimonious but not necessarily very realistic. A variety of types of interests did not in itself damage the theory, which required only that they be pursued efficiently, but it made it less elegant and parsimonious.

It was not necessarily the case that game theory could not cope with behavior other than the most egotistical. The authors of a popular account of game theory as a strategic tool noted that one difference from the first edition (1991) to the second (2008) was the “full realization of the important part that cooperation plays in strategic situations.”
²²
One way of providing a game-theoretic understanding of the development of social behavior was through iterated games, a point made most strongly by Robert Axelrod's
The Evolution
of Cooperation
. The origins of this book are intriguing. It can be traced to Anatol Rapoport, who combined intense interest in game theory with an equally intense anti-militarism. Discovering von Neumann's support for a preemptive war with the Soviet Union while the two were discussing support for mathematical biology was said to have been a turning point in his life. In 1964, he published a polemic against what he considered to be the misuse of game theory by strategists such as Schelling.
²³
While at the University of Michigan (before he moved to Toronto in protest at the Vietnam War), he actively promoted experimental games as a means of exploring the validity of theoretical “solutions” to theories of rational cooperation. Among a group who continued this work at Michigan was Robert Axelrod, also with a background as an antiwar activist.

Axelrod saw the possibilities of using computers to experiment with game theory by setting up a tournament. He invited experts to send programs for a game of prisoner's dilemma that could be repeated up to two hundred times to see if it was possible to learn or signal in ways that produced a cooperative outcome. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the winner was a simple program submitted by Rapoport. The requirement was to play continuing games of tit-for-tat, which required that one side replicate what the other did in the previous round. The first command was “cooperate,” and a continuing cooperative outcome flowed naturally. The message was that cooperative behavior could “thrive with rules that are nice, provocable, and somewhat forgiving.”
²⁴
This made a point about the possibilities of cooperation at a time of Cold War tension, and it had the great advantage of not depending on claims about how human goodness could trump amoral rationality. Other than the somewhat critical starting assumptions, the process was then computer dependent and untouched by human hand. Compared to the egotistical presumption of the theory, Axelrod demonstrated that cooperation could be rational.

Did this have any value for strategists? The presumption was that cooperation was a good thing except when it obviously was not (such as cartels). The book was a hymn to the virtues of altruism and reciprocity. Axelrod came up with four rules to establish cooperation. First, do not be envious. Be satisfied with absolute rather than relative gains, so that if you are doing nicely, do not worry is someone is doing even better. Second, do not be the first to defect, because you need to establish the logic of cooperation. Third, if another player defects, reciprocate in order to establish confidence in your retaliation. Last, do not be too clever, as others will not be sure what you are up to. Axelrod also pointed to the importance of a long-term perspective. If you were in a relationship for a long time then it made sense to continue
cooperation, even when there were occasional wobbles, but in short-term encounters there were fewer incentives to do so. Little might then be lost by defecting.

Axelrod's analysis was not irrelevant to the conflicts with which strategy was largely concerned, especially those where there were significant areas of cooperation even against the backdrop of a general antagonism or competition. But the specific form of the tit-for-tat approach, even in situations which approximated to the form of prisoner's dilemma, would be hard to replicate. A symmetry in position between two parties was rare so that the impact of moves, whether cooperation or defection, would not be the same. Cooperation was as likely to be based on exchange of benefits of different types as on things of equivalent value. This was why there were many ways in which cooperation could develop, for example by means of barter, rather than through iterated games of prisoner's dilemma. One important point was reinforced by Axelrod's tournament. Strategies have to be judged over time, in a series of engagements rather than in a single encounter. This is why it was unwise to try to be too clever. Players who used “complex methods of making inferences about the other player” were often wrong. It was difficult to interpret the behavior of another without accounting for the impact of one's own. Otherwise, what might have been assumed to be complex signaling just appeared as random messages.

Using iterated games (though of assurance rather than prisoner's dilemma), Dennis Chong looked hard at the civil rights movement to address the issue raised by Olson of rational participation in what he called “public-spirited collective action.” He saw the initial unwillingness to indulge in futile gestures and the later nervousness about taking personal risks when others were carrying the weight of the protest. This form of collective action offered no tangible incentives. Yet there were “social and psychological” benefits. It became a “long-term interest to cooperate in collective endeavors if noncooperation results in damage to one's reputation, ostracism, or repudiation from the community.”

Chong noted the difficulty with looking at strategy in terms of the one-off encounters to which game theory seemed to lend itself. The ability to think long term required taking into account the “repeated exchanges and encounters that one will have with other members of the community.” The difficulty collective movements faced was getting started. Chong's model could not explain where the leaders came from. They acted “autonomously” and got engaged without being sure of success or followers. Once a start had been made with the acquisition of the first followers but prior to any tangible results, momentum developed as a result of a form of social contagion. This
led to the conclusion, which might have been reached by more straightforward historical observation, that “strong organizations and effective leadership” combined with “symbolic and substantive concessions” from the authorities. In addition, it was wise to be cautious about being able to identify any “combination of objective factors in a society that will predictably set off a chain of events leading up to a collective movement.”
²⁵

The problem was not that the methods used in rational choice could not lead to intriguing and significant insights but that so many really interesting questions were begged. Unless preferences were attributed (such as profit or power maximization) because they would work well for most actors in most circumstances, then only the actors themselves could explain what they were trying to achieve and what their expectations were with regard to their own options and the reactions of others. This meant that before the theory could get to work it had to be told a great deal. As Robert Jervis observed, the “actor's values, preferences, beliefs, and definition of self all are exogenous to the model and must be provided before analysis can begin.”
²⁶
Rather than just take utility functions as givens, it was important to understand where they came from and how they might change with different contexts. “We need to understand not only how people reason about alternatives,” observed Herbert Simon, “but where the alternatives come from in the first place. The processes whereby alternatives are generated has been somewhat ignored as an object of research.”
²⁷

The point could be illustrated by the intellectual trajectory of William Riker. It was always an important feature of his approach that he did not assume that individuals were motivated by simple measures of self-interest, such as money or prestige, but allowed for other more emotional or ethical considerations. That is, utilities could be subjective, which reinforced the point about the prior determination of the preferences that were brought to the game.
²⁸
He also stressed that the structure of the game made a big difference. If the issue at stake was framed one way rather than another, alternative possibilities were opened up even with the same set of players.

In his outgoing address as president of the American Political Science Association in 1983, Riker identified three analytical steps. The first was to identify the constraints imposed “by institutions, culture, ideology and prior events,” that is, the context. Rational choice models came with the next step, which was to identify “partial equilibria from utility maximization within the constraints.” The third step was “the explication of participants' acts of creative adjustments to improve their opportunities.” Unfortunately, he noted, not very much effort had been devoted to this third step. This was the arena of what he dubbed “heresthetics, the art of political strategy.”
This came from Greek roots for choosing or electing. As areas of comparative ignorance, he listed “the way alternatives are modified in political conflicts” and the “rhetorical content of campaigns which is their principal feature.”
²⁹
These means were important because that is how politicians structured the environment and required others to respond to their agenda. They could prevail by creating a situation with its own inexorable logic. It was through these devices that they could persuade others to join them in coalitions and alliances. This led the field away from the position where Riker had previously placed his flag. Simon commented, “I could wish he had not invented the word ‘heresthetics' to conceal the heresies he is propagating.”
³⁰

Heresthetics was about structuring the way the world was viewed so as to create political advantage. Riker identified a number of heresthetic strategies: setting the agenda, strategic voting (supporting a less favored outcome to avoid something even worse), trading votes, altering the sequence of decisions, and redefining a situation. Initially he saw these forms of manipulation as separate from rhetoric, although it was hard to see how many of these strategies could work without persuasive skills. In an unfinished book, published posthumously, he was focusing much more on rhetoric. His disciples claimed that he was returning the discipline to “the science behind persuasion and campaigning,”
³¹
but he acknowledged he was moving into terrain where the science would struggle. The point was made in the title of his book on heresthetics,
The Art of Manipulation
. He was clear that this was “not a science. There is no set of scientific laws that can be more or less mechanically applied to generate successful strategies.”
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In his posthumous book he expressed concern that “our knowledge of rhetoric and persuasion is itself minuscule.”
³³
Riker certainly did not abandon his conviction that statistical analysis could sharpen his propositions, and he was determinedly avoiding a large body of work that directly addressed exactly the issues of agenda setting, framing, and persuasion that were interesting him, because it was too “belle-lettres” and insufficiently rigorous. However, he still ended up where so many students of strategists found themselves, fascinated by why some players in the political game were smarter and more persuasive than their opponents.

Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never

pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them
.

—David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1740

T
HE PRESUMPTION
of rationality was the most contentious feature of formal theories. The presumption was that individuals were rational if they behaved in such a way that their goals, which could be obnoxious as well as noble, would be most likely to be achieved. This was the point made by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume. He was as convinced of the importance of reason as he was that it could not provide its own motivation. This would come from a great range of possible human desires: “Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit,” which would be “mixed in various degrees and distributed through society.”
¹
As Downs put it, the rational man “moves towards his goals in a way which to the best of his knowledge uses the least possible input of scarce resources per unit of valued output.” This also required focusing on one aspect of an individual and not his “whole personality.” The theory “did not allow for the rich diversity of ends served by each of his acts, the complexity of his motives, the way in which every part of his life is intimately related to his emotional needs.
²
Riker wrote that he was not asserting that all behavior was rational, but only that some behavior was “and that this possibly small amount is crucial for the
construction and operation of economic and political institutions.”
³
In addition, the settings in which actors were operating—whether a congressional election, legislative committee, or revolutionary council—were also taken as givens, unless the issues being studied concerned establishing new institutions. The challenge then was to show that collective political outcomes could be explained by individuals ranking “their preferences consistently over a set of possible outcomes, taking risk and uncertainty into consideration and acting to maximize their expected payoffs.” This could easily become tautological because the only way that preferences and priorities could be discerned was by examining the choices made in actual situations.