H. Reiju Mihara
First version: January 2002
Last Revised: May 2002
I had a chance to visit the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech as Visiting Associate in Economics from September 2000 through March 2002. I will not dwell on natural sciences; Caltech's strength in natural sciences is indisputable. Many economists also know that Caltech is very strong in mechanism design and experimental economics.
Not so many economists or political scientists in Japan may know, however, that Caltech is also strong in analytical political science, often called rational choice theory or positive political theory. The fact is that positive political theory is one of the most important trends in political science in general, and that those big names in positive political theory are at Caltech. In most textbooks on positive theory, you find names of these theorists at Caltech, who played decisive roles in earlier theoretical developments and are active today (at the turn of the century) in related areas: John O. Ledyard, Richard D. McKelvey (deceased in 2002), Peter C. Ordeshook, Charles R. Plott. Younger ones include Jeffrey S. Banks (deceased in 2000), Matthew O. Jackson, and Thomas R. Palfrey, although Jackson may prefer to be classified as an economic theorist; in fact, I bet most do not care how others call them, economists or political scientists. (Other political scientists emphasizing empirical and institutional approaches are also conversant in theory.) For that matter, calling myself an economic theorist might be a bit misleading since most of my papers are in classical social choice (an important component of positive political theory). But let me justify that because I find that there is some gap between classical social choice theory (where you can do most of the things only with set theory) and contemporary positive theory, which uses spatial models and a lot of game theory.
When I came to Caltech, I had two purposes in mind. One was to learn recent developments in political theory and economic theory. I wanted to find some research topic and start writing a paper on the new topic. The other was to learn foundations of political theory. I wanted thereby to start developing new courses in political theory that were unique in Japan. The second purpose was no less important than the first one. When I was in college, I initially intended to major in political science and took courses in that discipline. There were many interesting courses, but I was dissatisfied with a vague logic that I found in almost all courses in political science compared to the clear logic that I found in economic theory. Sometimes assumptions were not clear; sometimes conclusions did not follow logically from the assumptions. Today, we have positive political theory, which is logically as sound as economic theory. But courses in positive political theory are still underdeveloped in Japan. A few textbooks in political science give a general idea of which theorist says what, but fail to teach the reader how to analyze or construct models on their own. I wanted to develop more analytical courses than those Japanese textbooks could teach.
My days at Caltech were not particularly rosy---my health conditions were only moderately good (in the first two months in Pasadena, I could hardly walk; during the rest of my stay, I suffered from irritable bowel syndrome and was afraid to eat outside), for example. But they were valuable days for me. I did have a chance to study political theory fairly systematically for the first time and found it very interesting. I got a better perspective and came to feel it easier than before to put current papers into context. I had expected that positive political theory would be more interesting than many applied areas of economics, but I found that it was even more interesting and open to controversy than I had expected.
Though Caltech offers courses in American Politics that deals with such issues as elections, parties, and legislative processes and courses in Comparative Politics, I decided to focus on theory. For one thing, I was more interested in Japanese politics than American politics; for another, I thought I had better learn them in Japanese since I was a very slow reader of English. My general plan for attending classes was (i) to attend advanced seminars earlier in my stay at Caltech and pick up some ideas for a paper and then (ii) to go back to foundations later to prepare for teaching. The approach worked more or less, but I am not sure if it was a better approach than starting from foundations. I wish I could have spent more time on my independent studies later in my stay; studying foundations took me more time than I had expected.
The official descriptions of the following courses appear in the Appendix. Bibliographic information of key papers and textbooks appears in the Selected References. I do not attempt to give an objective review of the courses. If fact, I mention only those papers that fit my interest or that gave me a strong impression.
I attended SS201a by Ghirardato, SS210a by Banks, and SS212a by Jackson. I also wanted to attend PS132 by Jackson.
Jackson taught an undergraduate course PS132 (Formal Theories in Political Science) this term. I didn't attend it, but wanted to. The emphasis was (i) welfarism and (ii) voting and social choice, including the spatial model. The textbooks were Moulin (1991), Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, 11, 9, 10, and Shepsle and Boncheck (1997), Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6.
In the first-year graduate course SS201a (Analytical Foundations of Social Science), Ghirardato taught utility theory rigorously, including static and dynamic choices. He also introduced interactive decision theory (game theory).
In SS210a (Foundations of Political Economy), a second-year graduate seminar, Banks discussed sophisticated voting and binary agendas, and then students discussed recent developments in incomplete information (the Condorcet Jury Theorem), at which point he got hospitalized to live the rest of his life. After the students discussed distributive politics (the Baron-Ferejohn legislative bargaining model, 1989; Jackson and Moselle, 200?, JET), I stopped attending the classes. Unfortunately, Banks murmured, probably because of illness. It was very hard for a Japanese ear (what is worse, I had an ear disease at that time) to catch his English. His notes "Strategic aspects of political system" (1996) was very densely and formally written, so a new comer like me had to spend a lot of time on it to understand even simple ideas such as sophisticated voting. The notes did cover important results in the area in a compact manner, so it should be a convenient reading after you understood the stuff. The Jury Theorem by Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) was interesting, but there were already a number of papers on this topic and things were becoming more and more technical. So I didn't feel like picking this topic for my paper. At that time, I failed to appreciate importance of the legislative bargaining model; it was deceptively simple.
In SS212a (Application of Microeconomic Theory), a second-year graduate seminar, Jackson discussed pairwise bargaining, networks and markets, formation of social and economic networks, and some other stuffs. I had not realized before that Rubinstein's bargaining model have so many descendents. We picked Rubinstein (1982) and Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1985). As for formation of networks, the classical papers by Myerson (1977) and by Aumann and Myerson (1988) already contained many important ideas. But you certainly will dislike their notion of stability. Well, Jackson and Wolinsky (1996) have a more sensible notion of stability. Why did it take 20 years to redefine stability, I wondered. But you can argue that that new notion is not noncooperative enough, and I did when I brought him my research proposal. Jackson saved my time by pointing out that papers based on that idea were published in 2000 or so. The topic uses graph theory, but you can do much just with mathematical induction. The problem is that somebody has just done the job when you hit on an idea. I skip networks and markets and other topics, though we covered several papers.
I attended PS/Ec 172 by McKelvey, SS210b by McKelvey, and SS212b by Palfrey. I was not allowed to attend the graduate game theory SS201b; there was only one graduate student taking the course, and the instructor wanted to tutor him.
In PS/Ec172 (Noncooperative Games in Social Sciences), an undergraduate course, McKelvey taught the standard noncooperative game theory. The required text was Myerson (1991), but the lectures followed his own notes. I think the notes (117 pages), densely and technically written, were more suitable to a graduate course in economics than an undergraduate course. The lecture was accessible, emphasizing intuitions and skipping highly technical details, though. Myerson (1991) is not an easy textbook either, but the students probably did not have much problem if they did not read it. (In the following year, Costa-Gomes, who was a visitor, taught the course using easier textbooks.)
In SS210b (Foundations of Political Economy), a second-year graduate seminar, McKelvey first discussed probabilistic voting models (Coughlin and Nitzan, 1981, J Public Economics; Hinich, 1977, JET). The course then dealt with information in elections (Ordeshook and Palfrey, 1988). The Condorcet Jury theorem is important but had already been taken up in SS210a in the preceding term, so we didn't spend time on it. Students then discussed several papers of their interest. Among them was Banks and Gasmi (1987, SCW) on endogenous agenda formation. Among the papers listed in the reading list but not discussed, I found Ledyard (1984) on voter turnout important and interesting. Most of McKelvey's classes were well organized---he handed out notes and used the whiteboard often. This is good news for a typical Japanese student (who studies in the US) with limited English. Almost inevitably though, this course, a seminar course design to help students find a topic they work on, was an exception.
In SS212b (Application of Microeconomic Theory), a second-year graduate seminar, Palfrey dealt with Bayesian mechanism design. For the most part of the course, students discussed assigned papers. I didn't read the papers much or understand the derivations well. Instead, I was content with understanding the frameworks. I attended the course with the hope of coming across with new ideas. Unfortunately, a lot of ideas seemed to appear in technical details in derivations. Unlike abstract implementation theory, Baysian mechanism design often consider specific examples with particular functional forms. Maybe I could have enjoyed the course more if I had earlier studied mechanism design that uses differentiation and integration a lot.
I attended SS201c by McKelvey and started a (secret) project on voting theory. As to the project, a few theorists told me that the incomplete information case should be more interesting, and Jackson suggested that I see Poisson games by Myerson (2000, JET). I started with the complete information case anyway. There were not very successful paper on the subject before. The project may have some connection with mechanism design, network, auction theory, and bargaining.
Since I always had been terribly uncomfortable with probability, I spent some time reviewing elementary statistics. During this term and the summer, I also read in Japanese political science and public choice textbooks, general books on issues like constitutional studies, and a guide to English writing.
In SS201c (Analytical Foundations of Social Science), a first-year graduate course, McKelvey taught implementation theory, some cooperative game theory, and some evolutionary game theory. In implementation theory, he used his notes on social choice to cover the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, Maskin's theorem, the revelation principle, the Clark mechanism, the Groves mechanism. He also discussed Baysian mechanism design using sections 7.2, 7.3, 7.4.4, 7.5.1 of Fudenberg and Tirole (1991). The part on cooperative game theory was based on Sections 9.1-9.6 of Myerson (1991), but not as detailed as the textbook. After introducing The Selfish Gene by R. Dawkins (1976), he used Sections 9.1, 9.2, and 9.4 of van Damme (1987; Stability and Perfection of Nash Equilibria) to discuss evolutionary game theory.
I attended SS202a by McKelvey and first several weeks of SS212a by Jackson. As to the project on voting theory, I seemed to be producing a lot of obvious lemmas. In the winter vacation, I did some refereeing of a social choice paper, which I found interesting, and helped someone with a paper on endogenous choice of voting rules. Since I said above that developing new courses was one of my goals, maybe I should mention that during the vacation I was preparing syllabuses for the next year. The emphasis would be game theory applied to politics.
In SS202a (Political Theory), a first-year graduate course, McKelvey taught social choice theory and voting theory. The most of the lectures were based on his notes on social choice (166 pages), though many sections on classical social choice were skipped. Chapters (1-4) on classical social choice in Austen-Smith and Banks (2000) were required, and the chapters (5-6) on the spatial model were supplementary to the notes. But students probably could have easily survived without reading Austen-Smith and Banks. In my case, some consultation of the textbook did help. You can imagine that highlights of the textbook were covered. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, Maskin's theorem on Nash implementation, a Groves mechanism were also covered. In addition to those firmly established stuffs, he discussed Caplin and Nalebuff (1991, Econometrica) on 64 percent majority rule, which uses Prekopa's theorem. He also dealt with electoral institutions (Kramer, 1972, J of Mathematical Sociology; Kramer, 1977 JET; McKelvey, 1986, AJPS), discussing sophisticated voting and mentioning structure-induced equilibrium (Shepsle, 1979 AJPS).
In SS212a (Application of Microeconomic Theory), a second-year graduate seminar, Jackson first discussed strategic agenda formation, then networks and employment. After that, students presented papers that they were interested in. I attended those classes that cover strategic agenda formation. The papers covered were Baron and Ferejohn (1989), Banks (1985), and Groseclose and Krehbiel (1993, On the pervasiveness of sophisticated sincerity).
I attended PS12 by Ordeshook.
Ordeshook taught the introductory undergraduate course PS12 (Introduction to Political Science) this term. He picked up some topics from his own textbook (Ordeshook, 1992) in an order that is unpredictable to me and also talked a bit about problems of drafting constitutions. The TA sessions covered exercises, following the text more closely. In the preceding year he assigned several papers and a few book chapters, but this year he assigned only the textbook. I attended his lectures because I was thinking of reading the textbook anyway. The lectures appeared a bit sloppy, but maybe that was not a problem because the text is well written (lots of typos though) and TAs took care of the formal stuffs. I thought maybe I could get some insights for teaching and research from his book and lectures that advanced textbooks and papers cannot give. After all, he was one of the best known positive political theorists on the earth.
Key references are listed. The list is highly selective:
The following course descriptions are copied from the official catalogs for 2000-2001 and for 2001-2002 for reference:
PS12. Introduction to Political Science. 9 units (3-0-6); second term. Introduction to the tools and concepts of analytical political science. Subject matter is primarily American political processes and institutions. Topics: spatial models of voting, redistributive voting, games, presidential campaign strategy, Congress, congressional-bureaucratic relations, and coverage of political issues by the mass media. Instructor: Ordeshook. [I attended this in Winter 2002.]
PS132. Formal Theories in Political Science. 9 units (3-0-6). Prerequisite: PS 12 or equivalent. Axiomatic structure and behavioral interpretations of game theoretic and social choice models and models of political processes based on them. Instructor: Jackson. [I wanted to attend this in Fall 2000.]
PS/Ec172. Noncooperative Games in Social Sciences. 9 units (3-0-6); first term. Prerequisites: PS 12 or equivalent. Axiomatic structure and behavioral interpretations of game theory models in social science. Axiomatic utility theory and general noncooperative games. Instructor: McKelvey. [I attended this in Winter 2001.]
SS201 abc. Analytical Foundations of Social Science. 9 units (3-0-6). This course covers the fundamentals of utility theory, game theory, and social choice theory. These basic theories are developed and illustrated with applications to electoral politics, market trading, bargaining, auctions, mechanism design and implementation, legislative and parliamentary voting and organization, public economics, industrial organization, and other topics in economics and political science. Instructors: Ghirardato, Palfrey, McKelvey. [I attended Ghirardato's 201a in Fall 2000 and McKelvey's 201c in Spring 2001.]
SS202 abc. Political Theory. 9 units (3-0-6). Course will introduce the student to the central problems of political theory and analysis, beginning with the essential components of the democratic state and proceeding through a variety of empirical topics. These topics will include the analysis of electoral and legislative institutions, legislative agenda processes, voting behavior, comparative political economy, and cooperation and conflict in international politics. The student will be sensitized to the primary empirical problems of the discipline and trained in the most general applications of game theoretic reasoning to political science. Instructors: Alvarez, McKelvey, Katz. [I attended McKelvey's 202a in Fall 2001.]
SS210 abc. Foundations of Political Economy. 9 units (3-0-6). Prerequisites: SS 202 c, SS 205 b. Mathematical theories of individual and social choice applied to problems of welfare economics and political decision making as well as to the construction of political economic processes consistent with stipulated ethical postulates, political platform formulation, the theory of political coalitions, and decision making in political organizations. Instructors: Banks, McKelvey. [I attended the first half of Banks's 210a in Fall 2000 and McKelvey's 210b in Winter 2001.]
SS212 abc. Application of Microeconomic Theory. 9 units (3-0-6). May be repeated for credit. A working seminar in which the tools of microeconomic theory are applied to the explanation of events and the evaluation of policy. Instructors: Jackson, Palfrey, Camerer. [I attended Jackson's 212a in Fall 2000, Palfrey's 212b in Winter 2001, and the first part of Jackson's 212a in Fall 2002.]