Exogenous Voter Preferences and Parties with State Power: Some Internal Problems of Economic Theories of Party Competition

This paper deals with the theories of electoral or party competition in liberal democracies which have been put forward in ‘economic’ models of democracy by Downs, Riker and Ordeshook, Robertson and others. There can be few doubts about the growing importance or appeal of these models, especially for North American political science. Barry, for example, argues that ‘we have seen the last of the “sociologists” in political science’, while in contrast the economic approach has ‘flourished quantitatively and qualitatively’. Barry attributes this change-round since the early 1960s to political scientists' penetration of sociologists' ‘characteristically sloppy logic and flabby prose to discover the deeper problems of circularity and vacuousness inherent in the approach’. In contrast, economic models have claimed the mantle of strictly developed deductive theory and displayed remarkable elusiveness as objects of criticism. Most attacks have been represented as irrelevant by appealing to the Friedmanite epistemology which denies any significance to the descriptive ‘realism’ of a deductive theory's assumptions. As Downs argued: ‘Theoretical models should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions rather than by the reality of their assumptions’. That such a naive verificationism cannot discriminate between the (potentially large) range of non-falsified explanations has not impeded economic models' progress, largely because a similar position is espoused in almost all competing ‘mainstream’ electoral analysis.