Henry Farrell over at his substack Programmable Mutter:
The back story to this post doesn’t start with Brian Eno. Back in 1991, the political scientist Adam Przeworski published a book, Democracy and the Market. Most of the book was about the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was very good as best as I can judge these things. But the first chapter was much, much better than very good. It laid out a brief theory of democracy that reshaped the ways in which political scientists think about it.
Przeworski’s theory starts from a simple seeming claim: that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” It then uses a combination of game theory and informal argument to lay out the implications. If we assume (as Przeworski assumes) that parties and political decision makers are self-centered, why would the ruling party ever accept that they had lost and relinquish control of government? Przeworski argues that it must somehow be in their self-interest to so. He argues that they will admit defeat if they see that the alternative is worse, and (this is crucial) because democracy generates sufficient uncertainty about the future that they believe they might win in some future election. They know that they will hurt their interests if they refuse to give in, and they have some (unquantifiable but real) prospect of coming back into power again. Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
This is a more beautiful idea than I am able to explain in a brief post, and certainly much more beautiful than any argument I will ever come up with myself. It compresses a vast and turbid system of enmeshed ambitions and behaviors into a deceptively simple nine word thesis
More here.
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