Cooperation's Effect on Constitutent Service, Ethnic Conflict

The following is my fifth-week reaction paper from a Fall 2006 class, Biological Approaches to Political Behavior, taught by Professors John Hibbing and Kevin Smith.

A unifying theme of this week’s readings is that people are not rational in action, but are rational in design. This is stated explicitly in Smith, and implied in the following: Guth and Tietz, who show that social acceptability trumps rational strategy; Fehr and Gachter, who show people engage in punishment behavior even though it’s not individually maximizing; in Boyd et. al., who do the same; in Kurzban and DeScioli, who show there are type of game players who employ different reciprocal strategies; in Orbell et. al., who show different cooperative types can evolve; and in Hammond and Axelrod, who explain the evolution of in-group favoritism and by implication show how it is a rational design feature of humans.

Also tying together the readings is a focus on in-group relations; for example, the authoritative decision-maker’s relationship with the targets of his or her decisions (Smith) and the (computer-modeled) ethnocentrist’s relationship with units people of its own color and cooperative type (Hammond and Axelrod). In this paper I argue for extending the latter two papers to shed light on how cooperative types interact with out groups in two cases: constituent service and ethnic conflict.

Smith offers an interesting explanation of what happens when a certain cooperative type, the wary cooperator, becomes a leader with authority over others. He suggests further research into how these leaders determine membership in the in-group whose sensibilities they so carefully consider, but does not address in any sense how the wary cooperator-as-leader behaves toward the out-group. Fenno’s (1978) list of a member of Congress’ four constituencies provides us a highly relevant out-group to study: the geographical constituency that did not vote for him or her. (The other three constituencies – personal, primary and re-election – are in-groups.) How do members of Congress treat the out-group among their constituents? Do they provide them less constituent service than they give to their in-group?

The ultimatum game can help answer these questions. Players would be told they are responsible for allocating a finite resource they own (time spent helping the recipient), which is worth some amount more to the recipient than to the allocator. They would further be told there are four kinds of recipients, the first three of whom were responsible in declining degree for electing the player to be the allocator: close friends, key election supporters, and general supporters. The fourth kind of recipient voted for someone other than the player to be the allocator. (For simplicity, nonvoters are ignored.) In a series of rounds the four kinds of players display three types of cooperative behavior – free riding, wary cooperation, and full cooperation, the object of this being that the four kinds of recipients, even ones who voted against the player, are heterogeneous in their value as cooperative partners (that is, even a “kind four� player can be a “good guy�). The hypothesis is that the player will favor the in-group even if they’re all scoundrels (they cooperate the least) and the out-group players cooperate the most.

But this doesn’t get enough at the difference between in-group favoritism (ethnocentrism), which could lead to simple passivity toward or peaceful non-cooperation with the out-group, and xenophobia, or active hostility toward the out-group. What is needed is some sort of mergers and acquisitions or corporate hostile takeover economic game, where it’s possible not just to decline to cooperate with another player, but actually to attack him or her regardless of his or her level of cooperation (attacking here is conceived separately from punishing behavior designed to promote in-group cooperation). Should such a game exist, or if one could be invented, it would offer ways to investigate how ethnocentrism becomes xenophobia, shedding light on ethnic conflict.