U.S. Politics – An Approximation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma?
Can U.S. politics be approximated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma? According to Jonathan Sallet in an article for The Hill (http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/179361-politics-and-the-prisoners-dilemma), they can. He argues that the U.S. political system in its current antagonistic state because the incentive structure is biased toward attacking opponents rather than working together. You can see how this resembles the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the payoff matrix below.
Prisoner’s Dilemma in U.S. Politics
| Democrats Support | Democrats Attack | |
| Republicans Support | 3 , 3 | -4 , 4 |
| Republicans Attack | 4 , -4 | 1 , 1 |
Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, your strictly dominant strategy is to attack your opponent’s plan. (I didn’t create a third category for Independents in this matrix because the two Independent senators, Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, caucus with Democrats and there aren’t any Independents in the House at the moment.) Let’s assume there’s a new Congressional Budget Office proposal about letting tax cuts expire. The Congressional Budget Office is intended to be nonpartisan, so we can ignore any effects of party loyalty to whoever proposed the plan. The decision is simply whether or not you should support the plan. Let’s make you a hypothetical Republican for the sake of discussion. If you think that the Democrats are going to support the CBO’s proposal, it’s in your best interest to attack that plan to maximize your payoff. As Sallet notes, partisan politics are a great way to fire up your base, get reelected and get money, all of which are important to political candidates and significant payoffs. If you expect the opposing party to attack this new proposal (e.g. Democrats think that letting the tax cuts expire is a terrible idea), it’s still in your best interest to attack it because if you don’t then you’ll lose face while the Democrats make significant gains. Even if you won’t win much, at least you won’t be losing. This same logic applies for a hypothetical Democrat. With this incentive structure, it’s no wonder that we have a dysfunctional political system that focuses more on personal attacks than legislative agendas.
California is trying a new approach to limit partisan politics and hopefully encourage collective action instead of mutual attacks. For the upcoming 2012 elections, California is eliminating party primaries and using a non-partisan committee to partition legislative districts. This decision is designed to make independent voters more relevant in elections instead of having elections be decided primarily by registered Democrats and Republicans. Registered Democrats and Republicans can potentially be influenced by partisan attacks and support the candidate who attacks for their beliefs. Their influence constitutes a payoff for the candidate making the attack because he or she can garner popularity by ostensibly fighting for the base. Independents, on the other hand, won’t get too fired up by partisan attacks (if they did, they’d probably associate with a party and not be independents), so it may become a better decision to work together rather than always fight. Independents could skew the payoffs to make attacking opponents a less desirable option and cooperating a more desirable option because they care more about successful legislation being passed than whether either party wins. We’ll see what happens in the 2012 elections.