Game Theory and Political Decision Making
Game Theory and Political Decision Making
If one flips on any news channel or reads any newspaper, it’s clear that political tensions are at an all time high within the United States. This has led to a tremendous amount of gridlock along partisan lines as well as disagreements about the direction in which each party should head. These factors among others have made passing legislation extremely difficult for both parties. Furthermore, with the two party-system in our country politics is often thought of as a sport or game where voters “root” for their favorite team or favorite political players. However, a recent article from Andy Kierz and Joseph Zeballos-Roig shows how politics can be thought of as a game in a different sense. They claim that progressive politicians should think of their upcoming vote on the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill as being analogous to the prisoner’s dilemma. For context, there are ongoing negotiations around two infrastructure spending bills, one is the aforementioned $1 trillion bipartisan bill. The other is a more progressive and far-reaching $3.5 trillion deal that progressives within the Democratic party are adamant about including alongside the $1 trillion bill. However, this more expansive bill has received pushback from Republicans along with more moderate flanks of the Democratic Party. This has led some within the progressive wing to question whether they should still vote for the smaller bill even if their more moderate colleagues are unwilling to support the more expansive social spending bill. Though Dems initially intended to have these bills coupled together as progressives wanted, recently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pushed forward the smaller bipartisan bill separately from the larger bill because of pressure from moderate Dems. This series of events led to the current choice that progressive Dems are faced with and they need to decide whether to cooperate or defect.
In the Networks course we covered the prisoner’s dilemma and landed on the conclusion that the Nash Equilibrium was for both players to confess or “betray” one another. To clarify, Nash Equilibrium can be thought of as a pair of strategies that are mutually best responses to the other player’s strategy. In the prisoner’s dilemma both players fare well if they cooperate. But if player 1 tries to cooperate and player 2 betrays, then player 2 will have the best possible payoff while player 1 will have the worst possible payoff. The same is true if their roles are reversed. However, if both players try to betray each other then they will both have a pretty poor result but not as bad as if they were betrayed while trying to cooperate. These 4 different scenarios result in the best strategy for each player being to betray the other player. To apply this to the vote that will be taking place in the House of Representatives on September 30th, progressive wing of the Democratic Party needs to decide whether they should cooperate with their moderate party members or if they should betray them and not vote on or vote against the $1 billion infrastructure bill. In this case, the progressives have an advantage that is typically not granted to players within the prisoner’s dilemma –they already know the other player’s strategy. By voting on the smaller bill without considering the larger bill the moderates have already made it clear that they intend to betray the progressive wing of the party. If the progressives vote yes to the smaller bill and in the process lose most of their leverage and essentially close the door for any further negotiations. If they vote neither bill passes and there’s still room for negotiations and they retain part of the bargaining power. They already know that the moderate’s are not going to cooperate, which takes the possibility of a compromised bill off the table, additionally, then will also be unable to pass the bills they want in their entirety which would have been the highest potential payoff. Based on the four potential payoffs, game theory says that the progressives should not secede to the moderates and should choose to vote against the bipartisan bill.
It is worth noting that this is a bit of an oversimplification of the issue and that there exists issues about having to continue working together with the moderate side of the party in the future. The relationships that come into play in D.C. and each politician looking out for the interests of their constituents (ideally) makes this “game” more muddled than the explanation above. Nonetheless, it is incredibly interesting to see how game theory can be used to analyze political decision making.