Motivating political support with group-based rewards
| Author | Alastair Smith,Bruce Bueno de Mesquita |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819833179 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(2) 156–182
ÓThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819833179
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Motivating political support
with group-based rewards
Alastair Smith
Wilf Family Department of Politics,New York University,USA
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Wilf Family Department of Politics,New York University,USA
Abstract
To compete in political contests, politicians need their supporters to contribute resources. We
investigate how politicians can best allocate group-based prizes on a contingent basis to incenti-
vize individual members of a group to exert effort on their behalf. We contrast contingent con-
tracts with tournament style contests (Lazear and Rosen (Rank-order tournaments as optimum
labor contracts. J Political Econ 1981; 89(5): 841–864)) and characterize when tournaments that
create intergroup contestsfor prizes elicit more contributions than contingent contracts. By tying
the allocation of prizes to the observed level of effort made by each group, politicians ameliorate
the collective action problemthat is created by the fact that each individual’s effort has only a min-
imal impact on the overall political contest. We examine the relative performance and stability of
intergroup tournaments as a functionof the number of groups and asymmetric group size.
Keywords
Club goods; political competition; politicalsupport; pork
1. Motivating supporters through groups
Despite the many partisan divides in the political world, a few principles are widely
agreed on in almost all quarters. Whether one examines the claims made by jour-
nalists, pundits, politicians, or political scientists, it is a commonplace assertion
Corresponding author:
Alastair Smith, Wilf FamilyDepartment of Politics, New YorkUniversity, 19 West4th St, New York, NY
10012, USA.
Email: Alastair.smith@nyu.edu
that the quality of government is improved as more citizens actively participate in
the political process (De Tocqueville, 1835). Hence Abraham Lincoln’s aspiration
that government should be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ as well as
the more prosaic calls for voters to turn out and citizens to be informed about the
issues of the day. Another widely shared principle is that special interest groups
distort political outcomes and diminish the quality of governance. Virtually every
politician declares that she will not be beholden to special interests but rather will
do what is good for the great majority of people. Yet, special interest group politics
flourish and continue to stimulate rhetorical disdain for their presumably perni-
cious impact on governance (Baumgartner et al., 2009; Cigler and Loomis, 2011).
Here we model ways in which special interest group politics improve both citizen
participation and their awareness of the issues of the day. Thus we demonstrate
the logic that makes special interest groups, at least in some important regards,
essential contributors to accountable government.
We analyze politics as a series of nested competitions. To compete against riv-
als, politicians need resources. We investigate how a politician can best incentivize
individual members of groups to contribute resources by making the allocation of
political rewards by the politician, should she win, contingent on group-level con-
tributions to her campaign. For instance, a politician might offer a group a specific
prize if she is elected, such as legislative priority for the group’s main policy issue,
provided that the group’s contributions exceed either some amount (that is, a con-
tingent contract (Ho
¨lmstrom, 1979)) or more than the contributions of other
groups (that is, a tournament (Lazear and Rosen, 1981)).
A politician has little control over the technology of political conflict; that is to
say, she can do little to influence how resources affect the likelihood of success in
the political contest. Of course more resources make success more likely, so politi-
cians want to incentivize their supporters to exert effort on their behalf. What poli-
ticians can shape is how group-based resources map onto the allocation of group
rewards, which we refer to as prizes. By shaping the curvature of the function that
determines whether the group receives a prize, a politician can incentivize support-
ers within groups to contribute significant effort. In particular, when rewards are
allocated contingently, individual members of groups have two incentives to try
hard for their preferred candidate. First, additional contributions by an individual
increase the resources available to his preferred candidate, and hence he improves
her chance of winning the political contest. Second, additional effort increases the
chance that his group will receive a prize, such as a favored policy or pork.
How to motivate people to work on behalf of a politician seeking to win political
power is a fundamental problem for politicians (see Cox (2015) for a review). As is
well established in the literature on rational voting (Ledyard, 1984; Myerson, 1998;
Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983, 1985)—or rather, the irrationality of voting (Green
and Shapiro, 1994)—the incentive to participate actively in politics suffers from a
collective action problem (Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1984). This is true whether we
are investigating democratic electoral politics, autocratic rigged elections, or violent
efforts to usurp power. To be successful, politicians must find the means to moti-
vate their potential backers to contribute resources to their campaign. These
Smith and Bueno de Mesquita 157
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