By Colman Cassidy

Abstract

This paper attempts to address whether it is possible to design a regime in which ‘political entrepreneurs’ will not exploit the clients they purport to serve.
For convenience, it is broken into six parts.  Part I discusses the gap in political science literature as regards political entrepreneurship relative to other areas such as parties, voting, elections etc.  Part II attempts to identify the root of modern-day political entrepreneurship in classical elite theory – taking the notion of ‘elite’ as a priori in relation to solvers of collective action problems in the contemporary world.  Part III explores the notion of the political entrepreneur as ‘hired gun’.  Part IV is a close-up of two entrepreneurial ‘case studies’, Jacques Delors and Charles J. Haughey. Part V reviews further considerations such as how to get rid of the ‘hired gun’, if need be. Part VI deals briefly with the notion of the entrepreneur against a background of institutional norms.

Introduction

At the heart of collective action theory is the search by individuals comprising this or that group for an equilibrium strategy.  One cannot simply assume that groups arise and are maintained – as Shepsle and Bonchek argue.  This is one of the central problems of politics in general.  Individuals are tempted to ‘free ride’ and “have problems co-ordinating on multiple objectives (non-uniqueness) and may even have differences of opinion about which common interest to pursue (conflict of interest)”. ¹⁾c.f. Shepsle, Kenneth A. and Bonchek, Mark, Analysing Politics: Rationality, Behaviour and Institutions. Harvard: 1995, ch.9.  On that basis there is need for an outside agent to enable people to solve their ‘co-ordination’ problems. Such problems can largely be solved if people can agree on a co-ordinated strategy.

Part I – Scope and Background

There is a notable gap in the literature in relation to political entrepreneurship – discernible as the failure to identify precisely what it is that drives political parties forward, the causal explanation for their actions.  There is, on the other hand, a dominant pre-occupation with an analysis of the policies that make political parties behave in a particular way.  It is, however, something of an anthropomorphic fallacy to attribute cognitive processes to a party or organisation.  This begs the question: what is it that links party, voting, elections and party competition – each of which merits so much attention in its own right among political scientists?  A response to that question requires us to focus on the role of the political entrepreneur.  In general, political scientists have failed to highlight precisely what is going on within parties or organisations.  And yet assumptions are being made all the time concerning how parties or cabinets arrive at this or that conclusion or initiative – on the basis of decisions taken by rational actors.  It is here that rational choice theory with its concentration on methodology, allows us to think rigorously about key issues that other theoretical approaches tend to neglect.  Such analysis is justified in terms of identifying the role and scope of the key actors involved as agents and instigators of the collective action policies demanded, say, by political parties.

The notion of the ‘political entrepreneur’ as a functionary who supplies political services for a ‘fee’, is not new.  Examples are redolent throughout history and literature – from Moses in the Old Testament to Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’.  The form the ‘fee’ takes will vary from one period of history to the next, but the principle remains the same in every era.  Moses was the political entrepreneur who chose to eschew the sharp Egyptian life-style of his day to turn a fledgling nation of émigrés into nomads and lead them to their Promised Land.  This initiative must surely find an echo in the Mao-led 1,000-day trek across civil war-torn China, in the earlier part of the last century.  It is in Machiavelli’s advice to his ‘Prince’, however, to emulate the ‘lion’ and the ‘fox’, that we find a basis for the elite theory that lies at the heart of political entrepreneurship in the modern world.

Part II – Elite Theory

Classical elite theorist, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) formulated a theory that identified a relatively small group of people as elite – that is, the social and political ‘shapers’ of society.  For him, the obverse side of what he called the ‘dynamic of elites’ was the total impotence of the masses.  The history of every society, in effect, was the history of relations between elites and non-elites – a view that paralleled Marx’s explanation in terms of class struggle.²⁾cf. de Pietri-Tonelli, A. and Bolusquet, G.H., Vilfredo Pareto. London: Macmillan, 1994, Foreword (by Michio Morishima).  Also, cf. Parry, Geraint, Political Elites. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969, p.45.
A fellow Italian, Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), another classical elite theorist, contended that whatever the form of government, power would be in the hands of a minority who formed the ruling class, the title, incidentally of his seminal work on the subject, published in 1896. ³⁾cf. Mosca’s The Ruling Class, translated by H.D. Kahn, New York, 1939.  In all societies, from the simplest to the most advanced, says Mosca, there are two classes of people – a class that rules and a class that is ruled.  It is its hold on political power that sets the ruling class in a given society – and this, as we shall see, has implications for the entire concept of political entrepreneurship.
Within elites ‘circulation’ occurs, Pareto argues .  He discerned a number of ‘residues’ in society which he was to summarise under two classes that provided the key to elite domination and elite replacement – with reference to the author of The Prince: Machiavelli prescribes that the political entrepreneur (prince/politician/director/manager) should assume the nature of a beast and in turn imitate both the fox and the lion, whichever is appropriate at the time: the fox can protect himself from traps and the lion can defend himself against wolves.  The ‘lions’ prefer the maintenance of the status quo under stable conditions while the ‘foxes’ are more creative and adaptive and can cope better under changing conditions. In rational choice terms, it follows that the political entrepreneur should not keep faith when this would be to his disadvantage nor when the reasons for pledging his word no longer exist.  If all men were good, this principle would not apply, but since it may be assumed that men by their nature are bad and would not keep faith with the ‘prince’, he has no obligation or incentive to keep faith with them. ⁴⁾cf. Machiavelli, Nicolo, The Prince. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1993, 19th chapter.
The two sets of qualities are mutually exclusive.  Politics, however, requires both the lion and the fox, Parry suggests.  It is partly a matter of force and partly one of persuasion, meaning in Pareto’s view, gaining the consent of the government by ruse. ⁵⁾Parry, op.cit., p.47.
Yet another classical elite theorist, Roberto Michels, a disciple of Mosca and friend of Max Weber, concentrated on the concept of power within political parties and trade unions – the power of organisations. ⁶⁾A former member of the anarcho-syndicalist wing of the (Marxist) German SPD, Michels became disillusioned and came to attack the ‘oligarchy’ of that party whom he accused of using the vested resources of the SPD for their own ends. The SPD was a massive organisation with its own permanent administration that ran into hundreds. cf. Michels’s Political Parties. NY: Dover Publications, 1959.  Mosca had identified organisational ability as a distinct scientific fact that elites have going for them (arguably, the key raison d’être of the modern political entrepreneur, given the ‘institutional’ dimension of his role, which is dealt with below).  This is close to Michels’s main argument concerning those who will become the elite or who will challenge the incoming elite: the inevitability of the rule of the elite lies in the very logic of organisation itself.   And complex organisation (as vested in the political entrepreneur) is, inevitably, hierarchical. In collective action terms, millions of people cannot possibly act in continuous co-ordination with each other.  If the organisation (sole political party or coalition, for example) comes to dominate, it is inevitable that the directing decisions will be made by a political elite: therefore, rule must be ‘hierarchical’ – regardless of how the leaders are appointed.  Mosca maintains that knowledge cannot extend beyond surveillance – from the individual’s viewpoint.  Such surveillance, he says, cannot be aggregated.  Only the few can qualify as ‘leaders’ (or politicians) for the maintenance of unity and choice in the activity of controlling. ⁷⁾The theory of socialism, the classical elite theorists asserted, gave legitimacy to elites in a significant way. Pareto, for example, examined very subtly the criteria within socialism under which elites are justified – precisely because they are not elites. All three believed it was not possible to introduce the masses to politics. They saw themselves as deflating the political pretensions of the masses – socialism in general and Marxism in particular.
Yet another example of the link between political entrepreneurship and elite theory is to be found in the work of C. Wright Mills, closer to our own day, who has this to say of the masses that are not involved in political decision-making on a day-to-day basis: “..they lose their will for rationally considered decision and action; they lose their sense of political belonging because they do not belong; they lose their political will because they see no way to realise it.” ⁸⁾cf. Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1959, p.324.

But while elite theory forms a useful backdrop for an analysis of modern political entrepreneurship, it is by no means the full picture. ⁹⁾Pareto was initially, at any rate, extremely sympathetic to Italian fascism and Mosca, too, was an apologist for fascism in the 1920s.  The focus for the rest of this paper will be on the notion of entrepreneurship that reflects the normative situation in liberal democratic polities.  This presupposes “a balance of forces that is simultaneously attractive to both aspiring political entrepreneurs and to members of a group desiring the otherwise forbidden fruits of collective action” and which gives the entrepreneur sanctions to coerce individuals and small ‘sub-groups’, but not the entire population. ¹⁰⁾Laver, Michael, Private Desires, Political Action. London: SAGE, 1997, p.71.  Let us now examine the entrepreneurial role of the politician, either as the leader of party or government or as the ‘entrepreneur’ chosen to deal with collective action problems at constituency or local government levels.

Part III – The Politician and the ‘Wild West’

In seeking to frame a definition that encompasses the notion of political entrepreneurship, it is useful to examine the extensive political science literature on leadership as a backdrop to rational choice theory.  Extrapolating from this it is possible to focus on a number of definitions that embrace the notion of entrepreneurship quite comfortably.  For example: it is the behaviour of persons in positions of political authority, their competitors, “and these both, in interaction with other members of society…” ¹¹⁾Paige, Glenn D., The Scientific Study of Political Leadership. NY: The Free Press, 197, p.1.  Or it is exercised when “persons with certain motives and purposes mobilise, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage and satisfy the motives of followers”. ¹²⁾Burns, James MacGregor, Leadership. NY: Harper & Row, 1978, p.18.

It is the mobilisation and direction by a person (using essentially non-coercive means) of other persons within a society, to act in patterned and coherent ways that cause (or prevent) change in the authoritative allocation of values within that society. ¹³⁾Hah, Chong-Do and Bartol, Frederick C., ‘Political leadership as a causative phenomenon: some recent analyses’ in World Politics, Vol.36, No.1, Oct. 1983, pp.100-120.  For Blondel, it is the power exercised by (an individual)… “to direct members of the nation towards actions”. ¹⁴⁾Blondel, Jean, Political Leadership: Towards a General Analysis. London: SAGE, 1987, p.3.  And for Kellerman it is the process by which one individual consistently exerts more impact than others on the nature and direction of group activity. ¹⁵⁾Kellerman, Barbara, ‘Leadership as a political act’ in Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984, pp.63-89.  It is reasonable to assume that not all leaders will possess the necessary acumen to fulfil the criteria required for political entrepreneurship. In the event, they must resort to the ‘hired gun’ to do the job for them.
Laver’s notion of the Wild West is a particularly useful metaphor through which to explore the role of entrepreneur – in obtaining the right to supply a bundle of political services that we think of as a regime.  The ‘hired gun’ is the equivalent of the political entrepreneur who contracts to supply externally enforced solutions to collective action problems.  Ideally, he has sufficient fire-power to coerce ‘free riders’ but not enough to overcome a concerted assault by the hiring group, should he decide to renege on his contract (cf. case study on Charles J. Haughey, below). The element of competition signified in the notion of alternative guns for hire, should the entrepreneur not measure up, is also useful for explaining the predicament of the modern-day politician. The ‘hired gun’ has therefore every possible incentive to protect his reputation as a strong and competent and trustworthy agent. The ‘gun’, too, is symbolically relevant in our analysis, denoting as it does the potential of a ‘weak’ person to kill a strong man – precluding the possibility of a Hobbesean (totalitarian) outcome.¹⁶⁾Private Desires, p.70.
The question is: why should somebody seek to resolve ‘equilibrium problems’ for the group?  What are the incentives for someone to become a political entrepreneur? ¹⁷⁾Rational choice theory tends to preclude philanthropic explanations in this regard, on the grounds that such a theoretical solution is less than challenging – virtually any theoretical problem may be resolved by the introduction of a philanthropist.  It is assumed that the role of agent or external enforcer or whatever carries a package of ‘entrepreneurial’ incentives and opportunities that are sufficiently attractive for the incumbent.
Hitherto, entrepreneurs were regarded as instrumental actors, obtaining rewards for their political services, with little or no regard for their own private desires.  But rational choice theorists nowadays tend to take the view that people want power not just for its own sake.  It is clear, as Laver points out, that politicians will have their personal preferences, too, that may be closer to what they would prefer in their private capacity: “Other things being equal, the politician has an incentive to deviate from the agreed package of political services, in the direction of his or her own private desires.” ¹⁸⁾Private Desires, p.84.

Similarly, Shepsle and Bronchek make the point that experiential behaviour is “consumer-oriented activity” – predicated on the belief that the activity is fulfilling, apart from its consequences.  Individuals will be animated both by the consumption value of an activity and its instrumental value: “To insist on only one of these complementary forms of rationality, and to exclude the other, is to provide but a partial explanation.” ¹⁹⁾Analysing Politics, ch.9.
Different politicians will have particular agendas and goals that they will seek to impose as policy.  These will vary in line with the focus and scope of their personal ambitions – and can significantly affect the decision-making process.  One politician/leader may concentrate, for example, on the procedural aspects of government – to ensure that the business of government runs smoothly – while another might be more policy-orientated.²⁰⁾Blondel, Jean and Muller-Rommel, Ferdinand, ‘Introduction’ in Governing Together: The Extent and Limits of Joint Decision-Making in Western European Cabinets. London: Macmillan, pp.1-19.   Others will be more policy-neutral and less reformist in their approach.  Thus it is that the same country may experience different types and forms of political entrepreneurship at different times as a result of changing from one ‘agent of collective action’ to another. ²¹⁾Elgie, Robert, Political Leaders in Liberal Democracies. London: Macmillan, 1995, pp.9-10.  In practice, this could mean that the collective action problem per se has just been ‘re-allocated’; a problem or set of problems resolved by initiatives undertaken by one entrepreneur may lead to further problems that require action by his successor.

Wagner, in a definition of the political entrepreneur’s role fine-tuned from his critique of Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, (Harvard University Press, 1965), describes him/her (the entrepreneur) as someone who sees a prospective co-operation dividend that is currently not being enjoyed.  For Shepsle and Bonchek this is another way of saying that there is a “latent group, which, if it were to become manifest, would enjoy the fruits of collective action”. ²²⁾cf. Analysing Politics, ch.9.  They cite the experience of a Victorian Englishwoman in the China of her day who was assured that the person flogging a group of workers hauling a barge was in fact the employee of the very people he appeared to be ill-using.  He was the ‘catalyst’ or agent they relied upon to optimise their endeavours

This gives us some clue as to the intrinsic nature of the entrepreneur – as to what makes him/her distinctive from run-o’-the-mill ‘leaders’ and politicians.  A couple of case studies from the ‘real world’ of politics will help to illustrate:

Part IV – Two Case Studies

(1) Former European Commission president, Jacques Delors had much in common with Jean Monnet, the architect of the Common Market, as a consummate shaper and innovator.   The biggest difference between the two men was that Delors became a politician. ²³⁾Grant, Charles, Inside the House that Jacques Built. London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994, pp.274-280: “He (Delors) had to pull himself up from the ecole communale of the Rue Saint-Maur, from six years of night school, from sorting securities in the Banque de France and from a trade union research department.  Delors had to work in a more competitive and complex world than Monnet.” (p.276).  He went on to father the Treaty of European Union (Maastricht), and presided over two revisions of the European constitution.
Delors encapsulates in his achievements most of the personal and professional qualities associated with the modern political entrepreneur.  In an age of resurgent neo-liberalism, he stands virtually alone as the successful socialist of the 1980s and early 1990s: “Many political leaders say they want to change the world.  But Delors – unlike Mitterrand, Gonzales and most of their contemporaries – was not content to manage the system he inherited, more efficiently.  He succeeded, to a startling degree, in repainting Europe’s political landscape.” ²⁴⁾ibid.  The former EC president fits Wagner’s definition, above, neatly – as someone who saw a prospective co-operation dividend that was currently not being enjoyed, and ran with it.  Among his salient entrepreneurial achievements was the fact that he managed to persuade many social democrats across Europe to accept, at least a degree of, supranational government – as evidenced, for example, in his 1988 visit to the British TUC conference, an initiative that made a significant dent in the trade union Euroscepticism in Britain.  He was less successful in his attempts to woo the Thatcherites and Gaullists, however, who accused him of virtually ignoring the changed conditions in Eastern Europe wrought by the collapse of communism.   Instead of opting for a tighter and more federal European Union, they contended, the EU should have given immediate membership to the Eastern European countries.  Delors, however, was implacably against such a course on the grounds that it would be premature to admit Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the ‘Visegrad Four’) before they were ready for the Single Market and prior to the necessary democratic reforms being implemented.  He got his way.

(2) The aftermath of the 1989 Irish general election is a prime example of rational choice theory in action.  It evokes the notion, too, of evolutionary game theory, best thought of in terms of ‘social genes’ that determine political outcomes – along the lines of conventional genes in biology.
The concept of classical game theory is easily grasped.  Take the chicken game; that’s where, for example, two teenage joyriders, each with a BMW, might challenge each other at 90 mph for the right to hold the centre of the road.  The one that swerves to avoid collision is the ‘chicken’.
Charles J. Haughey might be regarded as a political entrepreneur par excellence in that he managed to arrest the sharp downward spiral of the Irish economy by the introduction in the mid 1980s of three-pronged social partnership involving management, trade unions and government (the public service being a major employer).  In many ways he is a classic example of the agent, referred to above who had sufficient fire-power to coerce ‘free riders’ but not enough to overcome a concerted assault by the hiring group, when he reneged on his contract (by abandoning the Fianna Fáil diktat of single party government).
Haughey was to play his own version of the chicken game on 15 June 1989, after his minority government failed to block an Opposition motion calling for a £400,000 fund for haemophiliacs suffering from the AIDS virus.  He challenged the electorate, in effect, not to return him with the majority he had always coveted – and which had eluded him four times in a row.  The stakes were high, and he lost.
Fianna Fáil’s attempts to retrieve even the minority government status it had held prior to the election, failed.  This left the leader, as political entrepreneur, with no option if he was to stay in office during the impending Irish Presidency of the EC: like Esau, in The Bible, he abandoned his birthright, the most fundamental of FF tenets, single party government – and coalesced with his bitter enemies, the Progressive Democrats, led by his arch-rival, Dessie O’Malley.
The result was seminal loss of reputation for Haughey and Fianna Fáil, and naturally affected bargaining between the two parties over the formation of a new government.  While O’Malley’s party had been decimated at the polls – it lost half the 14 seats secured two years earlier in its first election – it was now, literally, in a position to hold Haughey to ransom.  In rational choice theory terms the scenario may be summarised in terms of one party’s willingness to co-operate and for the other to structure its responses, accordingly, tit-for-tat.  Thus Haughey, once he realised there was no possibility of the PDs supporting him in a minority government, embraced power and the EC presidency in a less-than brave new world. In the PD worldview, there was no question of conceding something now in the hope of achieving concessions from the larger party in any future tied election.   The O’Malley-led minority party decided Fianna Fáil would concede nothing unless it had to and said, in effect: our bargaining card exists now and it is more than probable that it may not exist later.
Haughey’s dilemma was just as simple: he could not hope to rule without the PDs.   He might need the same or a similar alliance again – and therefore could not afford to appear too intractable.

Part V – Getting rid of the ‘hired gun’

Once the contract is in place and the entrepreneur has undertaken to supply his political services, there is the danger that he may opt to rest on his laurels during his incumbency.  Or, as in the case of the ‘hired gun’ he may choose to exert his authority in other ways that will be adjudged ultra vires.  A number of ways are open to his employers to see that this does not happen.  One is to monitor progress on a regular basis.  This, however, may be costly – and gives rise to a collective action problem of another kind.  A series of knock-on effects in this regard are identifiable from the costs incurred in replacing the incumbent and the administrative fall-out that will inevitably result.  In mitigation of the anticipated upheaval is the fact that there may be alternative ‘hired guns’ waiting in the wings.
The politician as ‘entrepreneur’ who fails to deliver faces additional constraints such as the fact that his constituents – or interest groups within his constituency – may publicly challenge his inaction, either through staging strike or other actions or initiating a ‘letters’ campaign or whatever.  A rational politician will respond to such ‘voice’ protests because they may be costly to ignore.²⁵⁾Private Desires, p.76.

Normal rivalry between competing politicians is another consideration, particularly in Ireland where the ‘STV’ version of proportional representation virtually ensures that incumbent TDs must be prepared to repulse all attempts – not least from putative hopefuls within their own party – to unseat them from the day they first enter the Dáil.  In rational choice terms such a notion may be explained by reference to clients’ perception of the individual incumbent’s personality traits: “The individuality of these…traits means that each (politician) has the potential to affect the outcome of the policy process in a different way.²⁶⁾cf. Elgie, op. cit., p.9.  There is, too, the consideration that there may be a better personality ‘fit’ between a new incumbent and the people he will represent.  Albert Reynolds succeeded Haughey as Taoiseach following the disclosures on television by a former Minister, Seán Doherty (cf. reference to the ‘gun’ above as a metaphor for a weak person effectively unseating a strong incumbent).  Reynolds, in turn, was replaced by Bertie Ahern who acted as ‘political entrepreneur’ in his own right for a total of three Dáil terms before being overtaken by events, namely, loss of credibility as a result of the fall-out from high-level tribunal inquiries into payments to politicians.

Part VI – Institutions and Political ‘Enterprise’

And what of the political institutional framework?  The term ‘institution’ is used by Hall in a specific sense – meaning “the formal rules, compliance procedures and standard operating practices that structure the relationship between individuals in various units of the polity and the economy”. ²⁷⁾cf. Hall, Peter A., Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986, p.19.  On that basis it is clear that institutions produce rules and procedures that no political entrepreneur can afford to ignore.  That is readily appreciated in the EU context, with a performer such as Delors having to deal with a labyrinthine institutional bureaucracy on an everyday basis.  Such ‘obstacles’ are “relatively invariant in the face of turnover of individuals and relatively resilient to the idiosyncratic preferences and expectations of individuals”, March and Olsen point out. ²⁸⁾cf. March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., ‘The new institutionalism: organisational factors in political life’ in American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No.3, Sept., 1984, pp.734-749.  That means, in effect, that politicians must toe the institutional line, regardless – or even because – of their ‘entrepreneurial tendencies’.
Elgie notes, however, that ‘dynamism’ is often overlooked in institutional analyses: “There is a tendency to exaggerate that which is stable and to overlook that which is shifting.” ²⁹⁾cf. Elgie, p.207.  Within the political entrepreneur’s role, such factors will be deemed to be mostly ‘invariable’, it may be argued.

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to highlight some of the main considerations surrounding the general concept of political entrepreneurship in the modern world.   It is an area that until recently was virtually neglected by political science, but in recent times, has begun to come more into focus.
The role of the political entrepreneur is seen to take many forms in an ever complex world, not least in the area of communication – where media considerations develop an overweening importance, especially during election campaigns.  The collective action problems of parties facing into a general election in the face of a cold wind of ‘anti-sleaze’, for instance, would seem to justify, more than anything else, perhaps, the skills of the political entrepreneur, as ‘spin doctor’ or whatever.  More and more it is in relation to election campaigns that these skills come to be employed in an identifiable way that renders the notion of political entrepreneurship capable of empirical analysis.
This role is in a sense tautological, with the media consultant being called upon to address one set of collective action problems for a group (political party) which will enable it in turn to act as the collective action ‘agent’ for the voters.
In general, within liberal democracies, there would seem to be sufficient checks and balances – populist as well as institutional – to provide the necessary antidotes to excessive entrepreneurial flair and to ensure stability within the regimes created.

Colman Cassidy ©