Lame theory

Via Ry, here's a piece on why the Democratic party seems so much less united than the GOP:

Up until about 2006 GOP solidarity remained extraordinary. No Democratic president since FDR has enjoyed the kind of uniform, murmurless support from his own party commanded by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush...

I think this points out the importance of culture and organisational norms in determining the bounds of rational individual behaviour. It's not actually irrational for individual Republicans, like Olympia Snowe, to turn down Democratic offers of compromises and incentives in the interest of maintaining group discipline and voting "no" on health-care reform. It's rational for her to do that, because she knows that the rest of the senators in her party are, well, Republicans: they'll enforce discipline too, and the party will make political gains as a result that filter back to her. For Democrats, on the other hand, it would be crazy to pass up the opportunity for short-term gain from playing an outside game against the party, because they know the rest of the people in their party are Democrats. There's little point playing along with party discipline, because nobody else will. This is a multiple-iteration Prisoner's Dilemma game, and both parties know how their fellow prisoners generally behave.

So, Democrats are disuinited because Democrats are disuinited, and Republicans are united because Republicans are united. Brilliant. Score one for "game theory"! Or, wait...scratch that...the outcome of the multiple-iteration Prisoner's Dilemma game doesn't depend at all on the personal characteristics of the people playing the game. So, score one for pundits who throw around terms they don't understand!

How about this as an alternate explanation: Democrats simply have a much broader range of views, objectives, and supporters than Republicans do.

The Republican voter base is made up of two massive groups: 1) wealthy businesspeople ("economic conservatives"), and 2) Southern/rural white Christian tribalists ("social conservatives"). Yes, these groups have some conflicts, but not many (more on this later). By and large, each of these groups is homogeneous in most regards. In contrast, the Democrats' support base includes 1) blacks, 2) highly educated professionals, 3) Midwestern union workers (and former union workers), 4) Hispanics, 5) Western libertarians, 6) Asians, 7) Jews, 8) Upper Midwestern Lutherans, 9) women who care a lot about gender inequality, and 10) an assortment of poor whites who don't live in the South.

Obviously, the latter coalition is going to be more fragmented. The Democrats have come to be an "out-crowd"; a loose assortment of everyone who doesn't like the leadership of the big unified (Republican) blocs. This gives the Democrats a number of advantages - their size tends to grow over time, they can survive the defection of any one bloc, etc. But it means that a lot of the party's time and energy will be spent on internal dealmaking. This reduces the Democrats' governing effectiveness accordingly.

But it's striking how long the Democrats have been able to live with - and win with - the albatross of heterogeneity around their necks. In contrast, even a glimmer of internal dissent poses an existential threat to the GOP. And we may be starting to see such a glimmer, in the economic populism of the Tea Party movement.

Observers had long predicted that the Republican split would happen when economic conservatives (the wealthy) became fed up with the totalitarian impulses of the social conservatives. This never happened, because rich people know that any rules the Christianists enforce on the masses don't apply to them. Instead, what happened was that the economic pact that had kept the two GOP base groups united is breaking down as the Reagan/Rand economic approach finally crumbles.

The bargain was this: in exchange for supporting economic policies that increased inequality, the wealthy gave the mostly middle- and working-class "social conservatives" A) jobs working for the defense industry, and B) the ability to keep consumption high by taking out a lot of debt. (A) is going strong, but (B) was a Ponzi scheme. Now that the debt bubble is over, all those middle- and working-class Southern white Christianists are feeling the hurt and looking for someone to blame; obviously the prime candidates are immigrants and the black president, but there are rumbles of anger against the finance industry as well. Tea Party types, as typified by their standard-bearer Glenn Beck, have been almost as vocal as lefties in their condemnation of Bush's bank bailouts. This is a big worry for the robber barons; Obama won't be in office forever, and Mexican immigration is trickling off, and at the end of the day Southern white folks will still have lots of debt, no jobs (except in Texas), and falling house prices. Their anger, as fickle as Glenn Beck's tears, could easily turn against the finance types who made the system what it is, and the GOP could be in for a world of hurt.

Anyway, to bring this post back to where it began, game theory makes for fun math but not incredibly useful analysis. You can't just look at any situation and shrug and say "it's an equilibrium" (as the writer of the blog post does); you've got to define the game structure, the payoffs, and the beliefs. The real insights into the behavior of America's politicians will come from looking at the payoffs - from examining who America's political actors are, and what they want.