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Populism, Heresthetics and Political Stability: Richard Seddon and the Art of Majority Rule
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2009
Abstract
Because New Zealand's majoritarian political system presents few institutional barriers to change, social choice theory would predict that it should experience frequent change in governments and policies. Although some periods in New Zealand history confirm this expectation, a striking exception is the Liberal era of 1890–1912. To explain the anomaly, this article applies Riker's concept of heresthetics, the strategic manipulation of decision processes and alternatives. The Liberal leader, Richard Seddon, masterfully exploited four main heresthetic devices that offer enduring insight about how to sustain a popular majority. While extending the scope of heresthetics as an explanatory principle, the article rebuts Riker's normative dismissal of populism. In terms compatible with social choice theory itself, Seddon's strategies can be interpreted as having enabled the will of the majority to prevail.
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References
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25 Miners, among the most militant of workers, were mostly located in rural areas. (Seddon represented a mining constituency.) Conversely, many of the bourgeoisie, especially in country towns, depended upon farmers' prosperity. Thus the correlation between geographic location and economic interest is far from perfect.
26 Totals do not match, because some MPs had more than one occupation and are counted twice; the occupations of eight others are unspecified. For profiles from which these tallies were derived, see Hamer, , New Zealand Liberals, pp. 361–7.Google Scholar
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46 He did not always succeed, however. One of his notable failures led to the enfranchisement of women.
47 The distinction is not meant to imply that micro-heresthetics cannot also have historic consequences. The failure to pass a vital bill, or its passage in an unacceptable form, may bring down a government or fatally weaken its electoral support. ‘For want of a nail…’
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105 For Seddon, loyalty was a two-way street. He never fired a minister, and in electoral contests, he normally endorsed sitting members (Hamer, , New Zealand Liberals, pp. 204–5, 249, 252)Google Scholar. The possibility that the last added member of a coalition receives as payoff its full marginal contribution plays an important role in game theory as the basis of the Shapley value and its well-known application, the Shapley-Shubik index of voting power. See Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C., An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), chap. 6Google Scholar; Shubik, Martin, Game Theory in the Social Sciences: Concepts and Solutions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), chap. 7Google Scholar. Social systems sometimes operate consistently with this principle, as is evident from American professional baseball under the free agent system, universities that pay faculty according to their willingness to test the job market, and the history of New Zealand politics before 1890. All three examples demonstrate that rewarding the disloyal encourages churning of personnel and organizational disequilibrium. Seddon's success in harnessing particularistic incentives to enforce party unity and policy stability shows that there is nothing inevitable about distributive disequilibrium.
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