Debate Among the Democratic Party and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Currently, the Democratic party is in conflict over a $1 trillion dollar roads-and-bridges infrastructure bill and another $3.5 trillion dollar social spending bill. The infrastructure bill is backed by the centrist faction of the party, and the social spending bill is backed by the progressives. Originally, the infrastructure bill passed the Senate in June, and both factions agreed to move the two bills forward together, since each bill contained most of its respective faction’s major goals. A vote in the House of Representatives was scheduled for today, but recently, after house Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to backtrack on the deal to pass both bills together, the progressive faction has started to change their minds about the bills as well.
This conflict within the Democratic Party resembles the prisoner’s dilemma, one of the most well-known scenarios in game theory and the first one we learned about in class. As we learned in lecture, the “best move” for each party in an isolated prisoner’s dilemma situation is to betray the other party. Although it seems like cooperating will bring the best result for both parties at first, communication is not allowed in a prisoner’s dilemma, so it is far safer to betray the other party, since the overall consequences of picking “betray” are less than picking “cooperate”. However, as Andy Kiersz, the author of the article, writes, this is not necessarily the case for situations where the two parties have multiple interactions with each other. Kiersz mentions a 1980 experiment that found the best strategy in situations with repeated prisoner’s dilemma was something they coined “tit-for-tat” (Kiersz). In this strategy, the parties choose to cooperate at the beginning, but switch their strategies to whatever their opponent chose in the previous round. Therefore, parties can gain the trust of others who choose to cooperate with them and punish parties who choose to betray.
The progressives initially showed an intention to cooperate with the centrist faction when they raised the plan to pass both bills together, but after the centrists turned on their own word, the progressives immediately voiced their intentions to reject the plan as well, which resembles the beginning of the tit-for-tat strategy. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds as the voting continues for the two Democratic bills.