American Government - Chapter 1 Notes

Why Contradictions and Conflicts in American Politics?

  • American politics is marked by contradictions and conflicts.
  • The course aims to navigate these conflicts and understand their resolutions.

The Puzzle of Taxes

  • US government and states often face budget crises with deadlines.
  • Disagreements over budgets reflect differences in policy goals and societal outcomes.
  • Americans have contradictory opinions on taxes and fiscal responsibility.
Contradictory Opinions
  • Americans prefer lower taxes.
  • Americans prefer balanced budgets.
  • It's challenging to balance budgets with tax cuts because taxes fund government programs.
The Core Conflict
  • Americans want to benefit from programs but prefer not to pay for them.
  • Cutting taxes while maintaining programs is difficult.
  • Websites like pollster.com and gallup.com show numerous examples of these contradictory opinions.
Role of Political Science
  • Political science examines these contradictions and conflicts.
  • It helps understand how to resolve them and how they are resolved in politics.
  • It also looks at patterns, complexities, and actions of elected officials.

What is Politics?

  • Politics is the process of making decisions for the collectivity.
  • It involves allocating resources and creating/enforcing rules for society.
  • Conflicts over debt limits and spending priorities exemplify chaos.
  • Institutions shape debates about current events and policy outcomes.
  • Politics is the struggle for who gets what, when, and how.

Politics in Everyday Life

  • Conflicts also occur in everyday life.
  • Decisions involving many people often lead to conflicts due to different preferences, such as room temperature, music noise levels, or scheduling of exams.
  • Conflict is natural in politics and life.

Institutions and Their Role

  • Institutions are rules or sets of practices that determine collective decision-making.
  • They help decide how people make collective decisions as a group and what actions they decide to take.
  • Examples range from branches of government to specific rules.

Examples of Institutions

  • The legislative, executive, and judicial branches are institutions.
  • Rules for selecting the Speaker of the House are institutions (e.g., Mike Johnson's selection in 2023).
  • Organizations like the Electoral College, IRS, Republican, and Democratic parties are institutions.
  • Rules like separation of powers, election procedures, judicial review, and campaign finance laws are institutions.
  • Norms like waiting in line or using a coin toss in a football game are also institutions.
  • Universities and state legislatures are institutions as well.

Formal vs. Informal Institutions

  • Formal institutions are codified in written form (e.g., Congress, the presidency).
  • Informal institutions, like political parties and interest groups, are also crucial.

Political Systems

  • A political system is a bundle of institutions at various levels.
  • Institutions shape policy outcomes and resource allocation.

Federal Political System in the US

  • The US has a federal system with institutions at multiple government levels.
  • Each level has independent authority over specific policy issues.

Collective Dilemmas

  • Conflicts and institutions lead to collective dilemmas.
  • These dilemmas are encountered daily and in politics.

Example: Messy Kitchen

  • A shared messy kitchen illustrates a collective dilemma.
  • Everyone wants a tidy kitchen but doesn't want to clean it.
  • Cleaning involves costs (time, effort) while others benefit without contributing.

General Definition

  • A collective dilemma has a conflict between group interests (clean kitchen) and individual self-interest (not cleaning).
  • It involves the incentive to free ride; to let others do the work.
  • There's a mismatch between individual and collective goals.

Other Examples

  • Playing loud music in a dorm: Self-interest vs. group interest.
  • Individual's right to smoke vs. others' desire not to smell smoke.
  • Black Lives Matter: Protesters bear costs, while many others benefit from the movement's attention.

The Role of Government

  • Government protects citizens from each other (violence, property, contracts).
  • Without government, society would be chaotic with unsolvable collective dilemmas.
  • There would be no recourse for crime victims, encouraging more crime.
  • Thomas Hobbes viewed a government-less world as violent with low life expectancy.
  • Essential services would be underprovided.
  • Lack of taxation would lead to underprovided services.
  • Contemporary examples of lawless societies: Parts of Afghanistan, Yemen, Mali, show how competition and unsolved dilemmas exist among unchecked militias.

Types of Collective Dilemmas

  • Four types will be examined: collective action problems, prisoner's dilemma, coordination problems, and unstable coalitions.

Collective Action Problems

  • The messy kitchen is a collective action problem where individuals free ride.
Free Riding Defined
  • Free riding means letting someone else do the cleaning and enjoying the benefits without contributing.
Public Goods Defined
  • Public goods are benefits provided to a group that each member can enjoy, even without contributing.
  • One person's enjoyment doesn't inhibit others' enjoyment.
  • Examples: clean air, clean water, police protection, national defense, public universities, libraries, public radio.
  • Public goods face free riding issues.
  • Free riders benefit without paying the cost.
  • This is a hard problem to overcome.
Solutions to Collective Action Problems
  • Government can be an external enforcer forcing contributions to minimize free riding.

Prisoner's Dilemma

  • Game theory scenario with two players (e.g., Frank and John).
  • They are being interrogated separately for a crime they allegedly committed together.
  • Each can stay silent or implicate the other.
The Dilemma
  • Best outcome: Both stay silent (cooperate), resulting in light sentences.
  • The temptation to defect leads to a suboptimal outcome.
  • If one stays silent and the other implicates, the silent one gets the heaviest sentence.
  • The equilibrium: Both implicate each other, resulting in medium sentences.
Real-World Implications
  • Individually, there's no incentive to cooperate, even though collectively it's better.
  • Similar situations exist in politics, like entitlement reform.
Entitlement Reform (Social Security and Medicare)
  • Both parties benefit from cooperating to keep systems sustainable, but neither wants to act alone due to voter backlash.
  • Repeated interactions can help solve prisoner's dilemmas as players build reputations for cooperation.

Coordination Problem

  • Coordination issues exist in everyday life.
Example: Two Friends Meeting
  • Two friends want to eat together but can't communicate where to meet.
  • Each has their preference (Chinese or pizza).
  • The priority is to meet at the same restaurant.
  • Worst case: They go to different restaurants and fail to coordinate.
  • Any situation in which each individual has the priority to act together, but it is hard to do.
  • Difficulties arise from a lack of information.
Game Theory Example: Battle of the Sexes
  • A couple wants to go out, but one wants boxing, and the other wants ballet.
  • Priority is to go to the same place.
  • Perfect communication solves it, but issues arise with disagreement.
  • Repeated interactions can help to agree on alternating location to lunch.

Unstable Coalitions

  • A coalition forms in favor of an alternative, but some are left out.
  • Losers in the original coalition have an incentive to raid the coalition to break it.
  • A new coalition is formed.
Example: Chinese Food vs. Pizza
  • A group decides on Chinese food, but someone wants pizza.
  • That person can offer to pay for someone else's lunch if they switch to pizza.
  • The initial coalition for Chinese food is broken. A new coalition will want pizza.
The Problem of Voting and Instability
  • According to Arrow's theorem there is no majority voting rule that completely solve and prevents the emergence of unstable coalitions.
  • Instability may never end because the first coalition get rated, the second coalition get raided.
  • To achieve some decision-making, the US House has a rule requiring the final vote to be between an amendment and the original bill.
  • Agenda setters control the number of available options, preventing unstable coalitions.

Principal Agent Problems (Delegation Problems)

  • These problems exist daily.

Definition

  • Principles hire agents to act on their behalf. (They delegate task)
  • The problem: Principles can't be sure if agents are acting faithfully.

Examples

  • Car mechanics and car owners
  • Restaurant employees and customers

Underlying Issues

  • Delegation increases efficiency, but it's difficult to know if agents are acting as instructed.
  • It's important to note that these are not collective dilemmas because there is no conflict between individual goals and collective goals.

Principal Agent Problems in Politics

  • Elected officials are agents of voters.
  • Elected officials are also principles because they delegate tasks to bureaucratic agencies.
  • Bureaucracies execute, administer, and enforce laws.
  • It's hard to make sure, so this is a principal agent problem.

Solutions

  • Institutions mitigate principal agent problems.
  • Restaurant reviews (Yelp) monitor agent behavior.
  • Restaurants and car mechanics worry about their reputation.

Political Solutions

  • Governments create rules and procedures.
  • Elections serve as a check on elected officials. (If the don't live up to their mandate, they get voted out).
  • Bureaucrats must document decisions to allow principal review to make sure the bureaucracy is acting faithfully.

Institutions and Public Policy

  • Institutions solve the four types of collective dilemmas and principle agent problems.
  • Broader, more stable sets of rules.
  • They determine how policies and laws are created and enforced to solve collective dilemmas and principle agent problems.
  • Think of them as rigid rules of the game.
  • Public policies are programs and decisions made and enforced by the government.

Institutional Design

  • The way institutions are created/designed affects policies.
  • Institutional design has distributional consequences in who get what, when, and how.
Example: Great Compromise
  • Two chambers in the legislative branch.
    • The lower house represents state proportional to population (Benefits larger states because of representation).
    • Senate with equal representation for each state (Benefits smaller states). The smaller has an equal amount of representation (2 senators).
      *The equalitiy represents a benfit
      *There can be cases that supreme court rulings may also imply institutional designed influence, such as Baker v Carr and Westbury v Sanders. These required equal population in House districts, redistribute power in the house from rural area to highly populated area.

Path Dependence

  • Decisions about institutions affect all subsequent decisions/policies.
  • Initial institutional design creates benefits for specific interest groups.
  • Those interest groups resist change even if it benefits the collective, threatening the policy those interest groups became attached to.
    *Because that is the case, there is dependence in the same path and intitations conitune over time even when their utility decreases.

Types of Institutions in the World

  • Democracy vs. Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism

  • Absence of citizen control over the government.
  • There is no principal agent relationship.
Subtypes
  • Dictatorship (Cuba, North Korea)
  • Monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Jordan)
  • Oligarchies (Iran)
  • One-party states (China). No competition and one party controls everything

Democracy

  • Ruled by the people.
  • Direct democracy vs. republic.
Republic (Representative Democracy)
  • Citizens elect representatives who make policies.
  • There's a principal agent relationship/ delegation
Direct Democracy
  • Citizens themselves make policies.
  • Some elements exist in the US through recall elections, referendums, and ballot initiatives.
Degrees of Democracy of Political Rights an Freedoms
  • We shouldn't think of countries democratic or non-democratic. It is a combination of both. There are degrees
  • Political rights and civil liberties help evaluate the degree of democracy.
Political Rights
  • Rights to participate in the political process. Very high on the spectrum in terms of elections
Civil Liberties
  • Degree to which people have a right to say what they think, express their views, to organize to protest, to run for political office, to pressure the government and judicial branch.
Comparison Table: The United States and Other Democracies
  • Federalism: The United States is a federal system
  • Executive: The United States has a presidential system -- it has a presidential executive branch. Rare in the world
  • Legislature: The United States has a bicameral legislature (house, senate).
  • Party system: The United States has a two-party system (Democratic, Republican).
  • Judicial System: The United States has common law is common

The Contradiction Revisited

  • The American people want lower taxes but prefer high spending.

Two Collective Action Problems

  • #1 Citizens want stimulus programs with free ride. Because in these cases the cost is borne elsewhere from themselves.
  • #2: Elected officials want balance budget and also want to be re-elected. Also can be interpreted as there is free riding and a risk of voting for fiscal responsibility to be re-election.\n*The result there that these programs end up being underprovided.
    *Poilitics is a away for us to understand how we can minimize that risk and can help mitigate partially some of these collective action problems and end up with a budget that is ateast more balanced than before without political institutions.