The evolution of consensus through coordinated action
| Author | Ishan Joshi |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09516298221108346 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The evolution of consensus
through coordinated action
Ishan Joshi
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,MI, USA
Abstract
Little is known about how the scope for deliberation can be compared across different branches of
government. Two things need to happen for a consensus to emerge in a particular setting.
Crucially, parties must coordinate to facilitate such provisions in the first place. Second, the quality
of this coordination must be able to override the other biases of the environment in the long run.
A parsimonious framework presents the necessary and sufficient conditions for both of these to
happen across different settings—legislatures, bureaucracies, and judiciaries. Complicating matters
are intra-group factions that have heterogeneous preferences. Interestingly, even if we assume fac-
tions that do not want to compromise outnumber those that do, it is the former that take the lead
in solving the coordination problem in equilibrium. A related finding suggested by these compar-
isons is that as institutional environments become more complex—and move away from purely
representative functions—the scope for generating this consensus is enhanced.
Keywords
Deliberation, coordination, consensus, evolutionary game theory, institutions
A large literature in normative political theory submits that a central benefit of deliber-
ation is that it generates a consensus among participants about how new laws and policies
should be created (Cohen 2002; Gauss 1999). In spite of ideological differences that
cannot be altogether eliminated, this concerted action by all participants elevates the
level and quality of discussion (Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Esterling et al. 2015;
Mansbridge 1983).
1
Because all participants can note that their viewpoints have been
Corresponding author:
Ishan Joshi, Department of Political Science, 505 S. State Street, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109,
USA.
Email: ijoshi@umich.edu
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(4) 552–588
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/ 09516298221108346
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
allowed to be aired before a final decision is made, the eventual policy outcome is imbued
with a quality of legitimacy that would be absent were it not for the exercise of deliber-
ation (Elster 1998; Manin et al. 1987; Habermas 1999; Macedo 1999). Needless to add,
these assertions presuppose the existence of such a norm in operation to begin with,
which is relatively unproblematic since this is an explicitly normative philosophical
tradition.
More recent formal work on communication also adopts this presumption in its ana-
lysis but focuses its analytical attention instead on technical problems of information
transmission and communication. Whether utilizing the game-theoretic or social choice
approaches, positive political theory models take it for granted that such a normative
enterprise has already taken root within a given institutional environment and instead
concentrate on the problems of communication that could arise within these exercises.
Armed with this admittedly far thinner (but more analytically tractable) working defin-
ition of deliberation, the task of these models is to then probe features of the relationship
between what is discussed and what is ultimately decided in settings where deliberation’s
normative features have already been settled and are outside the scope of the formal
model. Examples of this approach include: whether deliberation reveals true preferences
(Hafer and Landa 2007; Meirowitz 2007; Weelden 2008); whether information can be
aggregated across interlocutors without losing meaning (Austen-Smith and Feddersen
2006; Perote-Peña and Piggins 2015; Meirowitz et al. 2006); whether participants can
learn from the unfolding exercise (Dickson et al. 2015); whether final decisions have
been justified through first principles so that deliberation indeed delivers its promise of
legitimate laws and policies (Patty 2008).
As a consequence of their divergent operating conceptions of how a deliberative insti-
tution should be construed, these two approaches have produced only tangentially inte-
grated research streams despite their shared acceptance of the motivating assumptions
of deliberation. Normative political theory has remained removed from actual institu-
tional settings, placing its discursive emphasis on the preferred qualities that decision-
makers who are deliberating need to embody. This approach does not directly engage
with the concrete institutional rules that the microfoundational approach of positive pol-
itical theory would require. Formal political theorists for their part choose to sidestep the
unwieldy complexity of deliberative democracy’s most normative features and instead
frame deliberation through problems of communication and their attributes—problems
that are of course germane to a variety of governmental settings and therefore not
uniquely engineered to integrate the central precepts of deliberation—such as the gener-
ation of consensus and the tangible effects of deliberation on policy progress (Steiner
2008). As Dmitri Landa and Adam Meirowitz (2009) conclude from a recent study of
both approaches, the lack of speaking to common purpose has stalled the scientific
study of deliberation.
This article maintains that a lion’s share of the difficulty can be attributed to the
absence of a common working definition of deliberation, which has made it harder for
an institutionally-driven story of deliberation to emerge. On one hand, the normative trad-
ition presents deliberation as a set of axiomatic statements about how perfectly delibera-
tive agents are supposed to lead to superior policy outcomes based on a self-conscious
consensual impulse that works around ideological differences. On the other hand, the
Joshi 553
formal and game-theoretic approaches tackle the subtler problems of communication by
implicitly presuming that deliberative intent is built into the institutional design already—
without explicitly modeling it.
2
This present argument submits that it may be worthwhile to ask a preliminary question
first, one which integrates both of theseimperatives: What explains the provisions of delib-
erative institutions to begin with? After all, to abide by this consensual approach to policy-
making is a decision that is made in equilibrium. It cannot be assumed to automatically
obtain within a given setting. If deliberation promises a joint search for optimal policies
and laws, then its provision hinges on the interdependent decisions of discussants to
agree to cooperate under the auspices of such a venture. This is clearly a classic problem
of coordination, which when successfully solved will lead participants to hold their differ-
ences in suspended judgment while they agree to collaborate in the unfolding deliberative
exercises.
Finally, there is a methodological benefit to asking this question, in that it facili-
tates inter-institutional comparisons. A common definition of deliberation can be
expected to fruitfully organize a comparison across governmental platforms. In
each case, the definition of deliberation must insinuate itself into institutional life
despite the other limitations present in the environment; in particular, participants
must find it in their long-term interests to first give birth to and to then nurture
such deliberative provisions within governmental institutions. Moreover, these con-
siderations should be identifiable and separate from the other mission objectives of
the institution in question—to legislate, to administer, to adjudicate legal disputes,
etc. In other words, the survival of a norm of deliberation can be expected to be gov-
erned by different conditions in different settings. For example, a partisan lower-
house legislature must make explicit room for deliberative mechanisms that do not
interfere with the raw needs of partisanship or party affiliation. Similarly, turf-
conscious bureaucratic agents may not necessarily want to collaborate and share
information across vertical hierarchies or geographical specializations—unless
there is an explicit norm that enjoins them to do so, which is promoted and permitted
by their divided political principals.
Thus, to summarize, this article attempts to directly address the inter-institutional
comparability of deliberation as a norm of behavior through three main contributions.
First, it presents a workhorse definition of deliberation that integrates the central fea-
tures of the normative political theory approach—as a consensual approach to promot-
ing policy progress through discussion—with the game-theoretic concern for
institutional equilibria. This definition is used to establish the conditions under which
this norm could emerge in a generalized public-sphere setting. Second, holding this def-
inition constant, the model navigates this norm to other generic governmental settings
through simple extensions of the baseline model that study the effects of duration of
leadership, length of interaction, reputation concerns, and expertise—on normative
success. By doing so, the model is able to make statements about how the survivability
of this norm—its fitness—can be gauged and compared across these different settings.
Finally, through the analytical exercises generated by these inter-institutional compar-
isons, the model lays the methodological groundwork for a new conception of how
deliberation can be studied in political institutions.
554 Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(4)
To continue reading
Request your trial