I’m probably missing something obvious, but I don’t trivially see how this
Interestingly, this suggests that a leader can get high value from a group whose preferences are orthogonal to their own; pursue power in groups which care about different things than you!
follows from this
A leader’s power is high when group members all want to coordinate their choices, but care much less about which choice is made, so long as everyone “matches”. Then the leader can just choose anything they please, and everyone will go along with it.
Could you please elaborate?
Also, I have an outsider’s view of American (or, indeed, Western in general) politics, so I can be wrong, but I think an argument from empirics could be made against this:
It’s special-interest politics: look for policies with focused benefits and diffuse costs. Pile many such policies together, and you have a winning coalition.
At least in the two most recent American elections (2016 and then the 2018 midterms) it seems like it was very much not the case of people racing for the most focused benefits and most diffuse cost, but rather for the most efficient way to galvanize their voters, cost be damned. Think of the wall on the Mexican border—it would probably be exorbitantly expensive, including to those that voted for it, but it was a very powerful symbol that people who felt strongly about the issue could rally behind.
538 here do a kind of literature review—and find, amongst other things, that
racial attitudes mattered more in 2016 than in any recent election — even 2008, when the presence of an African-American candidate shaped the political conversation.
Unless I misunderstand the idea, I don’t think issues of race have a narrow focused scope of benefits and costs diffuse enough not to be noticed by other voters.
I also think this point
Would-be leaders make promises: they precommit to certain policies, thereby cutting off certain options if they win (i.e. sacrificing potential power), but gaining more support for their Schelling point in the process.
makes an assumption of voters being more-or-less perfectly informed about what the Schelling point (policies and laws) actually is. What if a leader could get elected by pre-commiting to certain policies, but then actually not act on them, while managing to convince the voters that they, in fact, are doing their best to implement these policies, but are failing to for a certain (probably not a very falsifiable) reason? Or does the model already support this in a way that I don’t notice?
So… it’s possible that there is something about Middle Eastern politics that I don’t understand, and it would be cool if you could clarify. If I understand you correctly, you write that farms in the South are owned by rich people. At the same time, you write that farms in the North are somehow connected to the ruling coalition, and because of this the government had to signal loyalty to them.
I was under the impression that in monarchic/autocratic countries it was near-impossible to be rich while not being connected to the ruling group (= not being the kind of agent the ruling group would need to signal loyalty to). The farmers in the South contradict that. How does this work?