3. What explains polarization?

[PvP] Well, let me then quickly go, very briefly, onto the question of what explains polarization because there were a number of interesting suggestions in the course of this week that didn't really address the question of what polarization let to, but what brought about polarization. At the most abstract level, Ignacio's [Ortuño Ortín] presentation about models of endogenous political party formation could count, if we had some notion of the polarization of political parties in the terms of their location in this. policy space. Well, anything as the theory of endogenous political party formation could be a contribution to the explanation of polarization.

Ignacio's contribution was providing a framework, even though he was reluctant to go into specificities, but it certainly provided an abstract framework within which one could think about these issues about where parties would at equilibrium locate themselves in the policy space. Of course, Humberto did that in a far more specific way.

[Shlomo Weber] I don't think it was that abstract. If you take the previous example of identity and you introduce additional dimensions for Europeans or Belgian [*]

[PvP] Perhaps. It requires more work on that part, to get the intuition behind this matter of…

[SW, ironically] Are you Belgian?

[PvP] Yes, I can show you [Laughter]

Well, certainly, Humberto´s paper was far more explicitly addressed to that question, even though in a somewhat misleading way I had pointed out to him, because there was a trick in the thing, there was a neat paradox which I think is extremely interesting. It was the very fact that the the voters were pragmatic rather than ideological that drove the polarization. And that was quite amazing. We could see with his model how that could happen.

But to say that there was polarization required some fuzzyness about the modality as opposed to the content of the platforms. What I mean by that is the following: when Joan tells us "tomorrow morning we shall try to make an effort to be punctual at 9,30", there is a difference between saying that and saying "tomorrow, everyone will be here at 9,30". Well, similarly, in political platforms, there is a difference between "we'll try to make every effort not to increase taxation" and "we shall not increase taxation, read my lips…".

Now a crucial feature of his model was this common knowledge that, in fact, the parties would not implement the platforms they were advocating, but something that would be a function of the position of the various preferences within society. So the pragmatists would drive the model. Let's assume some polarization of the contents of the platform, but if you added the modalities, in fact it wasn't that polarized, because what the pragmatists were really pushing were platforms which were far less radical than what they seemed to be. But, nonetheless, I found it an interesting model and one, again, that doesn't ask what we follow from polarization, if there is polarization, but what drives polarization.

In a way, that was also in René Torenvlied's model. It was also a study about the conditions under which polarization rather than oxidation or convergence would happen. So again it's something that's sort of going upstream -as it were- from the question of polarization.

4. Does polarization explain conflict?

The most explicit treatments of conflict in the whole of this week were not explicitly based on the notion of polarization

Let me then focus my last remarks on the question of whether we have learnt this week or we can find it plausible that polarization explain conflict. Has it been shown empirically that polarization causes conflict? Had there been some plausible, persuasive theoretical consideration that have been put forward in this direction?

I'll just make three remarks, the first two rather negative and the third one, I hope, more positive. The first negative one, it is just a trivial point. That, in fact, the most explicit treatments of conflict in the whole of this week were not explicitly based on the notion of polarization.

This must be said with some qualification for Marta Reynal-Querol's paper, because there the explanation was in terms of the detailed design of the democratic decision making, majorian versus presidential or proportional systems. Now it can be somehow connected to polarization, if we assume that majoritian systems have an intrinsic tendency to create more polarization, but, I mean, this was not part of what she was trying to show, it was rather implicitly assumed. If it can be assumed, there can be some connection.

But in the other two most explicit treatments of the explanation of conflict -namely Vincent Buskens paper on the conditions under which trust would arise and permit cooperation rather than conflict or in Jean Paul Azam's paper- polarization didn't play much of a role. There was some cosmetic effort at the beginning of Jean Paul's paper to connect it -and I'll return to that in a minute-, but what drove the model was the government's ability to commit itself. That was the important factor to explain the appearance of civil war in certain cases. [Next]

 

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