Winner Takes All: The Super Priority Status of Derivatives

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6. + everything.

Republican Liberalism: Representation and Rent Seeking

Republican liberal theory emphasizes the ways in which domestic institutions and practices aggregate those demands, transforming them into state policy. The key variable in republican liberalism is the mode of domestic political representation, which determines whose social preferences are institutionally privileged. When political representation is biased in favor of particularistic groups, they tend to "capture" government institutions and employ them for their ends alone, systematically passing on the costs and risks to others. The precise policy of governments depends on which domestic groups are represented. The simplest resulting prediction is that policy is biased in favor of the governing coalition or powerful domestic groups.

A more sophisticated extension of this reasoning focuses on rent seeking. When particularistic groups are able to formulate policy without necessarily providing off-setting gains for society as a whole, the result is likely to be inefficient, suboptimal policies from the aggregate perspective-one form of which may be costly international conflict.63 While many liberal arguments are concerned with the seizure of state institutions by administrators (rulers, armies, and bureaucracies), similar arguments apply to privileged societal groups that "capture" the state, according to assumption 2, or simply act independently of it. If, following assumption 1, most individuals and groups in society, while acquisitive, tend also to be risk-averse (at least where they have something to lose), the more unbiased the range of domestic groups represented, the less likely they will support policies that impose high net costs or risks on a broad range of social actors. Thus aggressive behavior-the voluntary recourse to costly or risky foreign policy-is most likely in undemocratic or inegalitarian polities where privileged individuals can easily pass costs on to others.64

This does not, of course, imply the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between the breadth of domestic representation and international political or economic cooperation, for two reasons. First, in specific cases, elite preferences may be more convergent than popular ones. If commercial or ideational preferences are conflict- ual, for example where hypernationalist or mercantilist preferences prevail, a broadening of representation may have the opposite effect

Second, the extent of bias in representation, not democratic participation per se, is the theoretically critical point. Direct representation may overrepresent concentrated, organized, short-term, or otherwise arbitrarily salient interests.

Moravcsik, A. (1997). Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics. International Organization, 51(4), 513-553.

Democratic mass parties are bureaucratically organized under the leadership of party officials, professional party and trade union secretaries, etc.... Of course, one must remember that the term 'democratization' can be misleading. The demos itself, in the sense of an inarticulate mass, never 'governs' larger associations; rather it is governed, and its existence only changes the way in which the executive leaders are selected and the measure of influence which the demos, or better, which social circles from its midst are able to exert upon the content and the direction of administration activities by supplementing what is called 'public opinion.' 'Democratization,' in the sense here intended, does not necessarily mean an increasingly active share of the governed in the authority of the social structure. This may be the result of democratization, but it is not necessarily the case.... The most decisive thing here- and indeed it is rather exclusively so- is the leveling of the governed in opposition to the ruling and bureaucratically articulated groups, which in turn may occupy a quite autocratic position, both in fact and form.

Weber, M. (n.d. [1946]) in Gerth, H. H., & Mills, C. W. (Eds.) From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 224-226). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.