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Social Choice Versus Populism? An Interpretation of Riker's Political Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Albert Weale
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Extract

William Riker is one of the most influential political scientists at present writing on the theory and practice of democracy. A quick count on my part of the Social Science Citation Index, normally a Siva of academic reputations, revealed nearly one thousand entries under Riker's name between 1971 and the beginning of 1982. Not only is his work frequently cited, it is read long after it is originally published. The Theory of Political Coalitions, probably his best known work, was published in 1962, and is still seriously discussed by those engaged in the empirical study of political coalitions. Moreover, Riker has always been anxious to show the relevance of technical work in political science to the political philosophy of democracy. His work therefore represents not simply an impressive scholarly and academic achievement, but also an important contribution to the more wide-ranging public debate about the nature and value of democracy.

Type
Review Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1984 , pp. 369 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

2 See for example Browne, Eric C. and Dreijmanis, John, eds, Government Coalitions in Western Democracies (New York: Longman, 1982).Google Scholar

3 Riker, William H., Study of Local Politics: A Manual (New York: Random House, 1959).Google Scholar

4 Riker, William H., Democracy in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1953).Google Scholar In the text I have relied upon the second edition, published in 1965, since it is more accessible and substantially unchanged from the first.

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16 Riker does pay some attention to the relative costs of forming different coalitions by introducing the idea of ‘side-payments’ which the members of a proto-coalition may offer to outsiders to induce them to join. Some aspects of ideological compatibility or incompatibility might be captured through the use of this idea – for instance where a side-payment takes the form of a promise to modify one's legislative programme. This is a less demanding way for ideological considerations to enter a theory of coalition formation than would be true of those theories in which ideological similarity is explicitly required. Compare, for instance, Axelrod, Robert, Conflict of Interest: A Theory of Divergent Goals with Applications to Politics (Chicago: Markham, 1970)Google Scholar and de Swaan, Abram, Coalition Theories and Cabinet Formations: A Study of Formal Theories of Coalition Formations Applied to Nine European Parliaments After 1918 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1973).Google Scholar

17 I have constructed my interpretation of the argument from The Theory of Political Coalitions, Chap. 2 and Appendix 1, and from Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C., An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar, Chap. 7.1 advise the interested reader who is new to Riker's theory to begin with Chap. 2 of The Theory of Political Coalitions, then to go to Positive Political Theory and then back to the appendix of the former work.

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39 Such a theory is advanced in Ackerman, Bruce A., Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; I have discussed aspects of this neutrality condition in Weale, Albert, ‘Review Article on Social Justice in the Liberal State’, Minnesota Law Review, LXV (1981), 685–700.Google Scholar