Interbranch cooperation and the shadow of the future

Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) experiments confirm and extend Axelrod’s (The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books, New York, 1984 ) Shadow of the Future hypothesis: subjects cooperate in infinitely repeated PD, but they also cooperate until near the end in finitely repeated PD. So the extended hypothesis...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Constitutional political economy 2016-09, Vol.27 (3), p.319-331
Main Authors: Baker, Travis J., Schwartz, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Constitutional Law
Constitutions
Cooperation
Divided government
Economic models
Economic theory
Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods
Energy
Experiments
Game theory
Games
Governors
Hypotheses
Interaction
International cooperation
Laboratories
Left wing politics
Original Paper
Political economy
Political Science
Political Science and International Relations
Political Science and International Studies
Prisoners
Probability
State government
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) experiments confirm and extend Axelrod’s (The evolution of cooperation. Basic Books, New York, 1984 ) Shadow of the Future hypothesis: subjects cooperate in infinitely repeated PD, but they also cooperate until near the end in finitely repeated PD. So the extended hypothesis is that cooperation depends on the probability of continued play. Observational tests of this hypothesis, or even applications, have been rare at best. Here we not only apply but test it for interbranch cooperation under separated-powers constitutions, specifically those of the American states, using the end of governors’ final terms as end points and the rate of overridden vetoes as the extreme case of a breakdown in interbranch cooperation. Controlling for a variety of factors, including divided government, we find support for the hypothesis, whose explanation of interbranch interaction fills a gap left open by Madison’s Federalist 51: how republican government can control itself when what is needed is “energy” more than safeguards.
ISSN:1043-4062
1572-9966
DOI:10.1007/s10602-015-9201-7