GORDON TULLOCK AT FOUR SCORE YEARS: AN EVALUATION Part 2 (Public Choice)

5. The Vote Motive

The truly original insights into the vote motive must be ascribed to Duncan Black, whose writings during the late 1940s on the median vote theorem and the problem of vote cycles make him the undisputed Founding Father of public choice, and to Anthony Downs, whose 1957 book introduced rational choice analysis to the study of democracy and representative government and defined the paradox of voting implicit in the rational abstention of voters when confronted with large-scale elections. Tullock, nevertheless, leaves firm footprints on the sand with respect to this area of public choice scholarship.

First, Tullock has focused attention on the relevance of logrolling and vote trading for majority voting in representative assemblies. In 1959, his paper on ‘Problems of Majority Voting’ demonstrated that majority voting mechanisms in the absence of logrolling and vote trading deny voters the opportunity to seek gains from trade available to them where varying minorities care more passionately than varying majorities over specific programs in the policy bundles potentially available through the political process.

However, utility-maximizing logrollers, in the absence of binding contracts among each other, typically induce excessive public provisions (in terms of median preferences) under majority rule. Only by requiring supra-majorities can this weakness be avoided. This insight, provides powerful support for a constitutional requirement that legislatures should always operate under supra-majority vote-rule constraints.

In 1981, Tullock returned to his earlier work on logrolling to address a perceived paradox in legislative behavior, namely the perceived stability of policy outcomes in a spatial environment seemingly conducive to endless cycling. His innovative paper entitled ‘Why so much stability?’ initiated a major research program on the topic now referred to as ‘structure-induced-equilibrium.’ Although Tullock’s contribution is generally referred to as logrolling, in truth it falls directly within the structure-induced paradigm.

Tullock’s contribution is based on the recognition that most government actions have the characteristic of providing a relatively intense benefit to a small group at a small cost to each member of a large group. Such bills are passed by several small groups getting together to logroll across their separately preferred programs. In line with his work in The Calculus of Consent (1962), Tullock distinguishes between two forms that logrolling can take, namely individual bargains and formal coalitions.

Individual bargains predictably involve everyone since anyone excluded can offer lower prices for his vote in order to get back in. Tullock claims that a stable equilibrium is likely in such circumstances, though it will not be a Pareto optimum. In this judgment he is incorrect. As Bernholz (1974) established, if there is a cycle in the voting, there is also a logrolling cycle, unless individuals somehow can commit themselves to a specific bargain.

Tullock recognizes the instability of formal coalitions, given that those excluded from the majority coalition can destabilize it through counter-offers, since there will be over-investment in projects favored by members of the coalition and under-investment in projects favored by the minority. Moreover, there is little evidence either of formal coalitions in legislative bodies, or of any systematic exploitation of specific minorities. Rather, as Tullock observes, the committee structure of Congress creates stability to protect itself from the chaos of endless cycles:

One simple procedure is to have the relevant committee which will, of course, contain representatives from both parties, canvass the House and decide which particular rivers and harbors bills would, in fact, pass if implicit logrolling were used on votes on each individual bill. This collection of specific projects can then be put together in one very large bill and presented to Congress as a unit. (Tullock, 1981, 199-200)

This was the first attempt to explain the observed stability of political equilibrium under conditions conducive to cycling within the framework of a strictly rational choice model.

Second, (in 1967a) Tullock re-focused the rational voter abstention model of Downs (1957) in order to take account of the phenomenon of rational voter ignorance. If information is costly and if voters rationally economize in obtaining it, then the original equation of Downs, where the expected payoff to the individual from voting in an election is:

where B refers to the net personal benefit expected from the victory of the voter’s preferred party or candidate, P refers to the probability that the voter’s vote is decisive, A refers to the voter’s subjective estimate of the accuracy of his judgment, Cv refers to the cost of voting, Ci refers to the cost of obtaining additional information and D refers to the consumption benefit received from voting.

Suppose, in such latter circumstances, argues Tullock, that Cv is negative as a consequence of social pressures, in which case voting is always rational. The cost of becoming adequately informed is much more expensive. In such circumstances, it would rarely be rational for the individual voter to cast a well-informed vote. In essence, most voters will be rationally ignorant (Tullock, 1967a, 114).

The fact that the average voter is rationally ignorant opens up incentives for highly motivated members of the mass media to attempt to influence others in their voting behavior. Tullock also addresses this issue (Tullock, 1967a). The expected payoff associated with such behavior is:

where Pp is the probability that persuasion is decisive and Cp is the cost of persuasion. For individuals working in the mass media, Pp is much larger than P and Cp is likely to be zero. Advocacy therefore is a highly predictable activity in political markets. Advocacy will be directed most heavily at rationally ignorant swing voters whose behavior typically determines the outcome of political elections.

So far Tullock discusses the provision and consumption of political information without specific reference to the important issue whether or not such information is deliberately deceptive, although he recognizes that there is a fine distinction between persuasion and lies. In a further essay, on the economics of lying, Tullock (1967a) Tullock focuses on the incentives for politicians to lie to rationally ignorant voters in the course of election campaigns.

The expected benefit associated with a political lie comes from its success in securing votes. This is the product of the probability that the lie will be believed and the probability that it will persuade individuals to switch their votes in favor of the liar. The expected cost of a political lie is the sum of any cost to conscience and the product of the probability that the lie will be detected and the loss of votes associated with such detection. According to Tullock (1967a), the rational vote-seeking politician will lie to the point where the marginal expected benefits are equated with the marginal expected cost. Predictably, politicians will lie more extensively to the rationally ignorant than to the well-informed voters.

Because competing politicians have clear incentives to expose each others’ lies, explicit lies are less likely than lies by inference. Politicians are well versed in such nuances of expression. Negative campaigning, where the respective campaign staffs of competing politicians, rather than the candidates themselves, lie about each other’s candidate and accuse each other of lying is an excellent example of such nuanced vote-seeking behavior.

Tullock’s natural economist instincts dominate in his approach to the vote motive. The current faddish popularity of theories of expressive voting, for example, wherein rational voters are assumed to vote their conscience rather than their interest, leaves Tullock unmoved and unconvinced. If individuals go to the polls, they vote their interest, as best such interest is perceived to be through the fog of rational ignorance, persuasion and lies.

One senses (and shares) Tullock’s skepticism concerning public choice scholars who relinquish the rational choice model in this field in favor of sociological explanations of human action. If Tullock’s understanding of the vote motive speaks little for the net benefits of democracy, this does not concern him, nor should it concern us. Tullock views the world as it is and not as it ideally might be. From this perspective, democracy is a very weak reed on which to rest the well-being of a nation, save when the domain of collective action is strictly and effectively curtailed by constitutional rules (Tullock, 1998, 2000).

6. Bureaucracy

Tullock’s 1965 book, The Politics of Bureaucracy, is the first application of the positive rational choice approach to a field that until then was dominated by ‘a normative mishmash of Max Weber’s sociology and Woodrow Wilson’s vision of public administration’ (Niskanen, 1987, 135). In this tradition, senior bureaucrats were viewed for the most part as impartial and well-informed servants of the prevailing public good as determined by each ruling government. The one prior book on bureaucracy by an economist (Ludwig von Mises, 1944) was essentially devoid of analytic content. Tullock’s (1965) contribution, therefore, inevitably was a voyage of discovery that opened up a fertile field for future research by challenging the fundamental premise that dominated the political science literature. Tullock is clearly influenced by Machiavelli’s The Prince and by Parkinson’s Law in modeling the behavior of senior bureaucrats and their subordinates.

Tullock models bureaucracy as a hierarchical system in which individuals advance by merit, as determined by senior bureaucrats. Ambitious self-interest motivates the behavior of all bureaucrats. The organizational system selects against moral rectitude. A man with no morals has a marked advantage over a more moral colleague who is willing to sacrifice career opportunities, at the margin, in pursuit of moral goals.

The moral quality of senior bureaucrats, therefore, with rare exceptions, is extremely low, not least because they must respond to the amoral behavior of ambitious underlings who seek to usurp their positions. There is no market check on the harmful organizational consequences of such unbridled personal ambition. It is also pointless to train bureaucrats in ethics, since self-interest dominates moral rectitude in this perverse non-market environment.

Because bureaus are hierarchical systems in which top-down decision-making is the norm, Tullock identifies two major problems that lead to organizational inefficiency. First, instructions are unlikely to pass down the hierarchy without distortion even in the absence of malevolent design. Tullock refers to this as the problem of whispering down the lane. Second, senior bureaucrats cannot access fully the information available at lower levels of the hierarchy. If they delegate they lose control. If they fail to delegate, their decisions will be ill-informed. Thus, Tullock shreds the central postulates of the political science research program and sets the scene for the economic analysis of bureaucracy.

Tullock (1965) focuses entirely on the internal organization of a bureau. Later work by Niskanen (1971) and by Weingast and Moran (1983) tightened the economic analysis and identified the link between bureaus and their sponsor organizations. This shift of emphasis opened up the path to important empirical analysis that strongly supports the rational choice approach. Tullock’s insights, culled from his personal experience in the Department of State, were indispensable to establishing this research program.

7. The Law

Tullock, the natural economist, rarely strays from positive rational choice analysis to engage in normative discussion. His first book on the law, The Logic of Law (1971a), however, is an exception to this rule. Here Tullock adopts utilitarian philosophy as first outlined by Jeremy Bentham, but as modified by Lionel Robbins (1938), by Nicholas Kaldor (1939) and by Hicks (1939).

Bentham’s brand of utilitarianism comprises a combination of three conditions (Sen, 1987, 39), namely:

1. Welfarism, which requires that the goodness of a state of affairs should be a function only of utility information regarding that state of affairs;

2. Sum-ranking, which requires that utility information regarding any state of affairs should be assessed in terms of the sum of all individuals’ utilities concerning that state of affairs; and

3. Consequentialism, which requires that every choice in society should be determined by the goodness of the consequent state of affairs.

Tullock’s only formal training in economics was the course provided in the Chicago Law School by Henry Simons, who is best known for A Positive Program for Laissez Faire (1934), a propagandist tract, more an essay in utilitarian political philosophy than in economics (Coase, 1993, 240). It is not surprising, therefore, that Tullock followed in his master’s footsteps, albeit modifying the utilitarian ethic to suppress the sum-ranking condition in favor of the Pareto principle.

In The Logic of the Law, the first book ever published in law-and-economics, Tullock explicitly refers to Bentham’s failed reforms of the English legal system, and claims that: ‘[s]ince we now have a vast collection of tools that were unavailable to Bentham, it is possible for us to improve on his work’ and ‘[h]opefully this discussion, together with empirical research, will lead to significant reforms’ (Tullock, 1971a, xiv). On this basis, Tullock launches a critical review of substantive law and legal procedure within the United States as they existed in the late 1960s.

Tullock recognizes the limitations posed by the ordinal nature of utility and the inability to make interpersonal comparisons of utility. To overcome these restrictions, he falls back on the approach first developed in The Calculus of Consent (1962), in which individuals are viewed as focusing on potential reforms from a long-term ex ante perspective behind a veil of uncertainty. In such circumstances, legal reforms that myopic individuals who suffer a short-term loss of utility might be expected to veto, nevertheless satisfy the unanimity requirement of the modified Pareto principle.

Tullock’s critical eye takes in most areas of substantive law in the United States — contract, tort, theft, robbery, tax, and family — but focuses most savagely on legal procedures within the Anglo-Saxon legal system, a focus that he has sharpened even more with the passage of time as he has become yet more enamored with Napoleon (the civil code) and yet more skeptical of Wellington (the adversarial procedures of the common law).

The Logic of the Law (1971a), Trials on Trial (1980) and The Case Against the Common Law (1997) all utilize a writing style more appropriate for policy-makers than for lawyers, rejecting the minutiae of legal footnotes for the straight-forward prose and anecdotal evidence for which Tullock is renowned. Not surprisingly, Tullock has failed to achieve the same level of influence over the legal profession as he has, with respect to public choice, over economists and political scientists.

Most lawyers are rent-seekers rather than scholars, slaves to the complex details of the law that provide them with their remuneration and profoundly mistrustful of ideas that appear to threaten their monopoly rents. It should come as no surprise that lawyers and legal scholars have responded much more favorably to the sophistry of Richard Posner a fellow lawyer who advises them that their pursuit of private wealth through lucrative adversarial litigation indubitably contributes to the wealth of society (Posner, 1973).

Undeterred by this apparent failure to influence the American legal profession, Tullock continues to launch successive assaults upon Anglo-Saxon legal procedure. In so doing, he identifies the weak link of Chicago law-and-economics. For, if litigation leads to incorrect legal outcomes and legal errors are not automatically corrected by future litigation, the assertion that the common law is efficient is extremely difficult to sustain.

In his most recent, and arguably his best book on this subject, The Case Against the Common Law (1997) Tullock deploys the rational choice approach to powerful effect, demonstrating that a socialistic court system, with salaried bureaucrats (judges) and below average intelligence jurors responding to the competing arguments of self-seeking lawyers, buttressed by the paid lies of their respective expert witnesses, within a system that is designed to restrict relevant evidence, is extremely unlikely to contribute positively to the efficiency of the law and to the aggregate wealth of society.

The fact that legal scholars of all brands, from Yale and Harvard to Chicago, choose to remain silent concerning the issues that Tullock raises, rather than to attempt to refute them, is suggestive that they know just how potentially devastating is his logic of the law for the continuation of the high incomes that they earn. Lawyers and legal scholars are sufficiently well-trained in the Socratic technique to recognize the importance of voiding it when confronted with such a formidable debater, so better armed than they are in the logic of the law (Goetz, 1987; Rose-Ackerman, 1987; Schwartz, 1987).

8. Bio-economics

In 1957, shortly after leaving the Department of State and while working in Princeton, Gordon Tullock became interested in social insects and in other aspects of biology. He prepared a manuscript that would be published in a much revised form only one third of a century later, dealing with issues of coordination without command in the organization of insect societies. In this early draft, he deployed economic tools to analyze the internal structure of ants, termites and a few other insect species. Tullock’s monograph was well in advance of the pioneering work of Edward O. Wilson who is formally and correctly credited with founding the field of sociobiology.

Tullock’s full bibliography contains a surprising number of publications in journals of biological science as well as a number of more popular publications in this field. One of these, his 1971b paper that applied economic principles to explain the behavior of the coal tit as a careful shopper, inspired a doctoral dissertation that provided a supportive empirical test of the avian feeding habits of the coal tit (Goetz, 1998, 629).

Together with Janet Landa, Michael Ghiselin and Jack Hirshleifer, Gordon Tullock ranks as one of the founding fathers of bio-economics. Most of his contributions were collected into his 1994 research monograph entitled: The Economics of Non-Human Societies. In this monograph, Tullock analyses the extraordinary feats of cooperation and adaptation to changes in their environments accomplished by ants, termites, bees, mole rats, sponges and (his favorite) slime molds, species that have literally microscopic or non-existent brains.

Tullock assumes that animals, plants, ameboid single-cells of sponges and the individual cells of slime molds all possess the functional equivalent of the preference function of human beings. This preference function is extremely primitive and is not necessarily mediated by way of a nervous system. A process of Darwinian selection and inheritance determines the success of such species in social coordination. He details the behavior patterns of such primitive species in terms of this rational choice model. It must be said that anyone who is prepared to argue the applicability of the rational choice model to the behavior of slime molds is indeed a natural economist!

9. The Editorial Initiative

Tullock’s career as journal editor began inconspicuously in 1966 when he edited the first issue of Papers in Non-Market Decision Making, the precursor to the journal Public Choice that would become the spear-head of the public choice revolution and arguably one of the most influential policy-oriented journals of the last third of the twentieth century. From the outset, Tullock displayed enormous entrepreneurial talent in launching and directing this editorial initiative.

Historians of scientific revolution (Kuhn, 1970) observe that textbooks and scholarly journals serve for the most part to consolidate rather than to initiate new research programs. The scholarly journals, in particular, tend to be conduits facilitating the preoccupation with ‘puzzle-solving’ that normal science epitomizes. In this sense, journals are vehicles of normal science constrained by the vision of the past and, at most, are reluctant agents in the process of scientific revolution.

Tullock was well aware from the outset of the preoccupations of journal editorship, indeed he had investigated the nature of the problem in his 1966 book entitled The Organization of Inquiry completed prior to embarking on his own editorial career.In that book, Tullock placed homo oeconomicus center stage in the non-market decision making environment of the typical scholarly journal and deduced on this basis an economic explanation of conventional editorial predilections for normal puzzle-solving science.

To understand the behavior of journal editors, Tullock argues, it is necessary to take account of the non-market environment of the academy, the institution central to the scholarly journal’s success or failure. Universities, with few exceptions, are either publicly-owned socialist institutions or are non-profit organizations in each case offering bureaucratic services in exchange for block appropriations and grants supplemented by fee income.

The senior bureaucrats responsible for their operations have few incentives to become acquainted with the details of their institutions’ outputs, particularly with respect to the nature and quality of advanced research and scholarship. Yet, they have strong incentives to utilize low cost filters for evaluating scholarly output as a basis for appointing, tenuring, promoting and remunerating their academic work-force. As a consequence, "[t]he whole responsibility for evaluating research, in essence, is left to the editors of the learned journals" (Tullock, 1966, 37).

Unfortunately, most editors exercise only a subordinate role in the evaluation of scholarship, essentially providing a brokerage function between scholars on the supply and the demand side of the market for ideas. As Tullock observes: "the job of journal editor, although respectable, is not of sufficient attraction to get the very best personnel" (Tullock, 1966, 141). In the typical case, where the editor is a respected but not a leading scholar in his discipline, truly important and innovative pieces of scholarship often will lie beyond his evaluation capacity.

In such circumstances, the use of anonymous readers becomes a lifeline for the intellectually overwhelmed editor. Recourse to this lifeline predictably will fail to protect the path-breaking contribution. Leading scholars often either refuse to referee papers or provide only cursory evaluations. Hard-pressed editors thus submit manuscripts "to relatively junior scientists since such men are rather flattered at the honor and are unlikely to delay and delay" (Tullock, 1966, 143). Under the shield of anonymity, the referee "is also not under any great pressure to reach the correct decision" (Tullock, 1966, 143).

In such circumstances, Tullock argues, editors tend to discriminate against ground-breaking articles because of risk-aversion in the face of augmented uncertainty:

The probability of error on the part of the original investigator is greater, the possibility of error by the editor in misjudging the article is also great, and it is certain that the article, if published, will be very carefully examined by a large number of specialists. Under the circumstances, the possibility that the editor’s own reputation will suffer from publication of such articles is a real one. It is not surprising, therefore, that these articles are sometimes hard to place. The problem is compounded by the fact that the prestige of a journal is affected by those it accepts; it is not affected by those it turns down. This probably leads the editors to some degree, at any rate, to play safe." (Tullock, 1966, 147)

Yet, in his own lengthy editorial career (1966-1990), Tullock did not reflect his own logic, did not play safe, did not hide behind the anonymity of referees, did not slip from the cutting edge of public choice and did not step down from the editorship of Public Choice even as his reputation became assured as one of the two leading scholars in the discipline. Instead, he deployed his journal as an active agent, seeking out contributions in areas where he detected important research deficiencies — vote models, logrolling, rent-seeking, the stability of political equilibrium, demand-revealing bureaucracy and autocracy are noticeable examples.

He placed the journal firmly behind empirical research, recognizing the problem of obtaining good data, and allowing authors scope to experiment with respect both to the use of proxy variables and to method (Tullock, 1991). Variable though the quality of published papers undoubtedly was, scholars of public choice were attracted like magnets to each issue of the journal for the gems that they might find — and might find only in Public Choice — because its editor was a genius and because rival editors both in economics and in political science, quite simply, were not. Once again, Tullock’s behavior diverged from that of the natural economist in its public-spirited, self-effacing, contribution to the development of an important discipline.

10. Tullock’s World View

In many respects, Tullock does manifest the characteristics outlined by Buchanan (1987) as defining the natural economist. However, as this essay demonstrates, Tullock is much more than this. He is a warm-hearted and deeply-concerned person with a powerful vision of the good society and a willingness to explore the reforms necessary to move mankind onto a better path.

In this regard, Tullock’s philosophy is utilitarian in the modified sense of the Pareto principle, further adjusted to allow for individual decision-making behind a veil of uncertainty. This philosophy, first spelled out in The Calculus of Consent, has been applied systematically by Tullock ever since wherever he has engaged in public policy discussion. Tullock is not an anarchist. He believes that there is a positive role for the state. No doubt that role extends in his mind beyond that of the minimal or ‘night-watchman’ state.

However, any such extension, is extremely limited. Unlike many professed classical liberals, Tullock has not allowed himself to be diverted onto a normative Hobbesian path by the events of September 11, 2001. Rather he has maintained a principled Lockeian position that a free society should never over-react to perceived violence and that basic constitutional rights should not be trampled on. He is a true friend of liberty, always watchful and vigilant in its defense. His good sense and common decency is much needed and highly valued in this increasingly troubled world.