Evolutionary approaches to politics
- 2002
- p.223-46.
Evolutionary approaches to politics are rare; especially where they could rival mainstream Public Choice: as positive theories of normal politics. With Schumpeter and Hayek, two protagonists of evolutionary thinking have dealt with political competition. Their concepts of political entrepreneurship and opinion formation remain rudimentary; but they point at important issues that mainstream public choice tends to ignore and evolutionary approaches tend to stress. We analyse politics as a compound of variety-creating processes of entrepreneurial rivalry and feedback-creating selection processes. Important parallels and differences become visible not only compared to capitalistic market processes, but also between various dimensions of poliical competition. Compared to pure representative democracy, direct democracy and inter-jurisdictional competition show characteristics that evolutionary approaches reveal more easily than rational choice equilibrium models. This relates to (a) the discovery and social use of dispersed knowledge and skills; (b) political entrepreneurs' creation of (attention for) issues for public opinion; (c) parallel learning from choices of rules in inter-jurisdictionary competition; (d) political barriers to entry and innovations in politics. It is shown that evolutionary concepts such as entrepreneurial creation or competition as a discovery procedure can be applied to politics. This is not to ignore fundamental differences to spontaneous market processes - on the contrary, by identifying such differences evolutionary approaches can make valuable contributions to comparative institutional analysis. - Reproduced.