Recently I’ve been considering politics in terms of game theory, and an interesting idea occurred to me. The US Constitution was established with three branches of government each keeping the powers of the others in check. The system does not depend on altruism. All organizations naturally want to expand their power, and the law is set up so that an expansion of one branch’s power would result in a loss of another’s. It’s a pretty good system.

What this structure did not anticipate, however, is that over the past 50 years the traditional Executive/Legislative/Judicial and Federal/State power struggles have been replaced almost entirely by a Republican/Democrat power struggle. Examples of this can be seen everywhere from congress largely giving away its authority to declare war to the executive, to the party-line 2000 Supreme Court decision that ordered Florida to halt the ballot recount, to the current consensus that a Republican congress will not impeach Bush even for continued violations of federal law and judicial oversight regarding wiretaps.

The bad news is that game theory does not seem to indicate that a two-way Republican/Democrat power balance is stable. The most likely result is that one side wins completely and the game ends.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 26th, 2005 at 1:52 pm and is filed under America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.