Competition in American Politics : an economic model

This volume is an extended analytic essay on political competi tion, political markets, and political exchange. It does not seek to offer new knowledge, in the strict sense of the term, but to formulate new questions and to restate familiar questions in a new way. The need for a new approach to the study of the American political system seems evident. If existing perspectives had the capacity to generate integrated whole-system insights, it seems likely that they would have revealed that capacity by now.. The shortage of powerful theoretical insights into the functioning of the political system as a whole speaks strongly to the need for exploring new avenues of attack.

In recent years a number of scholars have become interested in applying economic analysis to noneconomic social behavior. My debt to these writers will be evident throughout the book. Robert. A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom used the concept of exchange in Politics, Economics, and Welfare. This concept is also central to Alfred Kuhn's The Study of Society: A Unified Approach and Peter M. Blau's Exchange and Power in Social Life. R. L. Curry, Jr. and L. L. Wade in their splendid volume, A Theory of Political Exchange: Economic Reasoning in Political Analysis, suggest that political scientists will increasingly come to think about politics in terms of political exchange.

Anthony Downs's important study, An Economic Theory of Democracy, stresses the importance of competition in political markets, and Charles Lindblom's The Intelligence of Democracy emphasizes the role of the market as a coordinating device. Others who have contributed importantly to the development of a new interest in political economy are James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Kenneth Arrow, Duncan Black, and William Riker. William C. Mitchell and Joyce M. Mitchell have written a very interesting introductory text devoted to this approach, Political Analysis and Public Policy: An Introduction to Political Science.

Work on this book began a number of years ago but has been intermittent; the author's first notes to himself on the relevance of oligopoly theory to party competition date back to 1954. A first draft of the manuscript was completed and placed in the hands of the publishers in February, 1968. During the ensuing months the manuscript was reworked but without significant modification of its central ideas. The formulations offered here are necessarily first approximations, and the author has been willing to run the risk of occasional oversimplification in the interest of seeing how far selected economic analogies could be pushed.