Exit, Voice, and Democracy

Speaking of exit, voice, and domination, here's a very interesting paper by Mark E. Warren in the latest APSR: Voting with Your Feet: Exit-based Empowerment in Democratic Theory (gated, ungated earlier version), Volume 105, Issue 04, November 2011 pp 683-701. Abstract:

Democracy is about including those who are potentially affected by collective decisions in making those decisions. For this reason, contemporary democratic theory primarily assumes membership combined with effective voice. An alternative to voice is exit: Dissatisfied members may choose to leave a group rather than voice their displeasure. Rights and capacities for exit can function as low-cost, effective empowerments, particularly for those without voice. But because contemporary democratic theory often dismisses exit as appropriate only for economic markets, the democratic potentials of exit have rarely been theorized. Exit-based empowerments should be as central to the design and integrity of democracy as distributions of votes and voice, long considered its key structural features. When they are integrated into other democratic devices, exit-based empowerments should generate and widely distribute usable powers for those who need them most, evoke responsiveness from elites, induce voice, discipline monopoly, and underwrite vibrant and pluralistic societies.

Warren explicitly argues for a connection between mechanisms of exit and the promotion of nondomination, something which I had idly wondered about, and rightly argues that exit has often been neglected in democratic theory, even though modern democracies obviously depend at a basic level on certain forms of exit (e.g., from one political party to another). I also found Warren's discussion of the varieties of exit and their interaction with voice mechanisms (e.g., exit as signalling vs. exit as silence, and exit as free-riding vs. exit as empowerment) insightful, and his discussion of the ways in which exit mechanisms can be incorporated into modern democracies provocative.  (I should note that my first reaction to his argument was "I wish I'd written this paper!").

I have some quibbles, however. Warren notes that democracy is typically understood in terms of a voice-monopoly model in which collective voice is required to discipline the  potentially problematic effects of the state monopoly on violence:

The democratic case for voice usually assumes monopoly organizations. It does so normatively—voice is most important within the context of monopolistic organizations. And it does so structurally—monopoly induces voice by restricting exit. 

In these two respects, Hirschman's analysis tracks the fact that modern democracy was born of a specific kind of monopoly—that of states. In its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins, the democratic project focused on increasing inclusions within states that had effectively consolidated power by controlling territory, developing administrative capacities, and regularizing sovereignty through constitutional means (Poggi 1990, chaps. 1–2). The justifications for voice are closely related to these elements of monopoly in two ways. First, when a collectivity controls key features of livelihood, such as security, and solves collective action problems through coercion, then individuals subject to that coercion should have a say in how it is deployed. Second, the greater the costs of exit to individuals, the greater the need for voice. Though liberal-democratic states do not legally restrict exit from their territories, they recognize that exit is costly: It is disruptive of family, social support networks, careers, language, and culture, and can mean giving up the protections and welfare entitlements of citizenship. These monopoly-like effects are well recognized and justified by the existence of voice mechanisms—that is, democratic processes that legitimate the monopoly-like properties of the state. Thus it is appropriate that democratic theory has focused on equalities of political resources, secured by positive political rights (voting, speech, association) and related welfare rights (education and income security), as well as on the mechanisms such as electoral systems, judicial systems, public sphere discourse, and civil society activism through which citizens’ voice is translated into influence over law and policy (see, e.g., Habermas 1996, chap. 8).

The depth of attachment to monopoly within democratic theory stems from the fact that it is structurally necessary for the provision of common goods. As Hirschman's analysis suggests, democracies are sensitive to problems of collective action: Defectors from collectivities undermine democracy by undermining the possibility of common choice (Barry 1974). Union organizing is the archetypal case: The worker who breaks with the solidarity of the bargaining unit also undermines the capacity of the union to serve its members. More generally, as Olson (1971) famously detailed, when individuals are left to weigh the costs and benefits of collective action, larger groups tend to return fewer benefits, causing individuals to exit the collectivity, which in turn undermines the provision of public goods. As Hobbes understood, monopoly removes the threats to common security and provision posed by defection. Similarly, democratic theorists—particularly those focused on the important relationship between solidarity and collective choice—view exit opportunities as harmful, indeed, so much so that, as Hirschman (1970) observes more generally, exit is often branded criminal or treasonous (17).

Warren then rightly argues that voice is insufficient to the task of disciplining monopoly, especially given the scale of and the dispersion of power in modern states, and also that forms of exit can also play a role in ensuring that people affected by collective decisions are not unjustly dominated. Yet he does not discuss the possibility of exit from the state monopoly (aside from the brief mention of migration quoted above) except in terms that assimilate these forms of exit to "free-riding" (e.g., capital flight that hollows out public services). And the forms of exit he does discuss (what he calls "enabled" and "institutionalized" exit) are more or less dependent on the state insofar as they require the state to provide resources to make effective the ability of individuals to leave dominating relations, or to transform relations of domination into relations of choice. For example, a policy of full employment can be understood to enable exit from oppressive employment relations by reducing the costs of unemployment; and similarly extensive social safety nets, or a guaranteed minimum income can enable exit from such relations by making formal options (like quitting a job) much more easily taken. But forms of enabled exit are presented as dependent on the state in ways that suggest that Warren implicitly values voice more than exit, or at least thinks that voice is normatively or structurally prior to exit, and sets limits to its exercise, a view that seems to me to be unwarranted. (So Warren is fairly critical of the market as a mechanism for exit, in part because he thinks that the market tends to be biased against those with fewer resources). Yet it is by no means clear that all forms of exit from the state monopoly should be understood as forms of free-riding (see, for example, James C. Scott's work), or that enabled exit (making effective formal opportunities for exit) should be understood as something that only states can (or should) structure and provide, even if enabling exit may on occasion require large-scale collective action.

Perhaps this is a result of trying to fit a discussion of exit within democratic theory rather than simply liberal theory. It seems to me that there is something like a liberalism of voice that incorporates exit to a greater or lesser extent in its basic structure, and a liberalism of exit that similarly incorporates voice to some greater or lesser extent in its structure. Both forms of liberalism are concerned with nondomination, but they differ in their normative evaluations of the relative importance of exit and voice, in part due to different understandings of the relationships between, and the value of, the individual and the community. Warren's argument pushes a liberalism of voice closer to a liberalism of exit, but his position remains, in important respects, a liberalism of voice.

Exit, Voice, and Legitimacy: Responses to Domination in Political Thought

Albert O. Hirschmann’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States is a “generative” book: the ideas it contains are deceptively simple but enormously fruitful. The book starts from the premise that individuals faced with a “decline” in service or performance from an organization (including a state) can either “exit” (switch to a different product, move to a different jurisdiction, etc.) or exercise their “voice” (complain, vote, protest, etc.), and that the degree to which they will opt for exit over voice depends in part on their “loyalty” to the organization. What makes the book interesting is Hirschmann’s detailed exploration of the complex and sometimes counterintuitive interactions between exit, voice, and loyalty: e.g., how the threat of exit can make voice more effective, and yet actual exit often undermines its effectiveness, or how exit can serve as a signal to activate certain forms of voice (as in Hirschmann’s analysis of the fall of the GDR, extended and refined in Steven Pfaff’s excellent Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of the GDR).

Anyway, this is probably utterly obvious, but it occurs to me that Hirschmann’s conceptual framework can be used to make sense of some important features of contemporary political thought. In particular, to the extent that contemporary political thought conceptualizes the key political problem not as a problem of performance (pace Hirschmann) but as a problem of domination (how should we think and what should we do about the fact that some people appear to dominate others?), specific positions will tend to emphasize one or another of the three Hirschmannian “mechanisms” for dealing with it. Thus, “right-liberals” (libertarians, but also others) tend to focus on exit as the most important component of a solution to this problem, “left-liberals” (and many other leftists who would abhor the label “liberal,” but I want to leave these aside) tend to focus on voice, and “conservatives” tend to focus on legitimacy.[1]

To me, this framework makes sense of many features of contemporary theoretical (and not-so-theoretical) debates, at least those I more or less follow. For example, right-liberals (from Nozick and Friedman to so many others) are especially attracted to markets as solutions to political problems in great part because they think that whenever such markets work well, they enable some people to escape from particular relations of potential domination: to leave jobs, or to switch products, or to escape oppressive social conditions, etc. The competitive market functions here as an ideal of exit, even if actually existing markets do not always work as advertised. Similarly, where left-liberals typically prefer to tackle domination within markets by encouraging unionization and other forms of organized voice, like worker-controlled enterprises (see, e.g., Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice), right-liberals might prefer to make the costs of exiting relations of domination smaller by lowering barriers to employment (so that people who quit have other options). Thus, at the extreme, many right-liberals are fairly comfortable with “private” governments not because they are secret authoritarians, as some people on the left might argue, but because private governments are typically predicated on easy exit: if you don’t like it, you can leave. (Many right-liberals tend to tie “legitimacy” to the possibility of exit: a relationship is legitimate when it does not unduly close off the possibility of exit). Domination, from this point of view, is captivity, and freedom is primarily understood as the ability to exit a relationship.

By the same token, left-liberals (and other people on the left, though not all) are often far more enamoured of democracy than the dinghy realities of actually-existing democracies would seem to warrant, with their refractory electorates, poor quality deliberations, capture by organized minorities, etc. This is not necessarily because they are blind to their failings, but because their default solution to the problem of domination is to increase voice – more consultation, more deliberation, more organized representation, and the like. They find voice itself desirable, and understand freedom partly in such terms: to be dominated is to have no means of affecting the direction of a relationship, to be voiceless, and to be free is to have input into the relationship, to have a say, which in turn legitimates a relationship. (If you don't like it, you can complain, or vote, or otherwise "make your voice heard"). And so left-liberals tend to look on exit-based solutions suspiciously, rightly understanding (as Hirschmann noted) that unrestricted exit typically undermines voice, and prefer to strengthen institutions of voice, even if these do not always work so well. Democracy is the normative ideal of voice, just as competitive markets are the normative ideal of exit.

The conservative response to domination is best seen as an attribute of other responses. Whether a person favours exit or voice in general as a response to domination, a more conservative position will typically understand existing relations of domination to be more legitimate than a less conservative position. But to the extent that there is a distinctively conservative response to illegitimate domination, it tends to stress the need to legitimate the relationship in question. This may involve increasing voice or enabling exit, but it may also involve changing other aspects of a relationship: domination can be legitimate, for the true conservative, even when there is otherwise no possibility of exit or voice, so long as the right people are in charge, or the right rules are applied, or the right procedures have been followed, etc. (Some of the “natural law theorists” around Robert George might fit this sort of characterization; but generally speaking true “conservatism” in this sense is harder to find today than one might think). Of course, the conservative response in this sense may be at odds with the conservatism of one’s position: it is, after all, possible to think that existing relations of domination are almost wholly illegitimate (and so ought to be changed), but for reasons having little to do with the possibility of exit or voice within the relationship (e.g., one may think that the wrong people are in charge; this is the Platonic position).

I do not want to make too much of this scheme. Whether one thinks that exit or voice (or legitimacy) is the right response to domination in a given situation may depend on any number of factors, such as one’s estimates of the costs of exit, the value of the community affected, the different organizational requirements of enabling exit rather than voice, and so on. (Consider: it is generally agreed today that people in abusive relationships should be given the option of exit rather than voice, since it is generally thought that voice is pointless in these circumstances). But I think that “left” and “right” strands of (broadly liberal) thought often differ in the extent to which they tend to value exit over voice or vice-versa as responses to domination: there is a style of reasoning and a constellation of theoretical commitments that favour one response over another. Left-liberals typically see high costs of exit and value group solidarity in ways that they would prefer not to undermine by promoting exit. Right-liberals, by contrast, typically see many pathologies in arrangements of collective voice and tend to more heavily discount the value of existing group solidarity. I suspect this is partly a matter of temperament and circumstance: some people seem to be “exit” people, some “voice” people (e.g., some of my relatives, when they receive bad service in a restaurant, will complain and demand their money back; I will just stop patronizing the place), just as some people seem more “conservative” than others, for whatever reasons, and these propensities may lead them to sort themselves into patterns of political thought. It may also have something to do with one’s particular circumstances; if one cannot imagine leaving a place and starting out elsewhere, or if one’s “exit” options are extremely costly, one may come to think that voice is generally the right response to domination, whereas highly mobile people with many “exit” options may come to think that exit is usually the right sort of response to domination. (And political debates may shift to left or right over time depending on whether people see themselves as fitting into one or the other category).

But this is all extremely speculative. The point of looking at domination through this sort of framework, in the end, is less to sort people into categories than to consider the interesting interactions between exit and voice, since it is clear that most of us do not see domination exclusively through either lens. Domination is both captivity and voicelessness, and freedom is both the ability to leave and the ability to talk, though we disagree about the balance between these two aspects in given situations, as well as about the legitimacy of existing relationships of domination.  But, if we look at the interaction of exit and voice, we might sometimes come to surprising conclusions, just as Hirschmann did in his book. For example, we may come to see how exit and voice can be mutually reinforcing in the struggle against some forms of domination, but mutually undermining in other cases. Any thoughts?

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[1] I use these names to indicate primarily theoretical commitments, not practical ones; in practice, who counts as “liberal” or as “conservative” in existing political debates is hardly as clear, and sometimes may be entirely dependent on temporary alliances and “tribal” affiliations. I am also talking only about the face value of these theoretical commitments; obviously any position claiming to talk about the problem of domination can be appropriated for less than noble ends by clever enough political entrepreneurs, though not always without costs.

Polybius and the Dialectic of Forgetting (Or, Theoretical Models in the Classical World)

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, written as part of research for this project.)

The extant fragments of book VI of Polybius’ Histories contain a famous (in certain circles) discussion of the “cycle of regimes” (VI.5.10-9.14). The story goes more or less like this.

Human beings start in something like the “state of nature,” without arts or sciences, and in particular without highly developed moral norms, where we herd together like other animals following the strongest or most daring man (the basic primate pattern, we might say today: I can’t help viewing a lot of the stuff I’m reading right now through the lens of Boehm’s book, and this post will be no exception). This is what Polybius calls “monarchy” (μοναρχίαν), where the authority of the leader is limited by his physical strength and daring. This sort of “natural monarchy” then evolves towards kingship (βασιλεία) properly speaking, which is no longer a simple hierarchy sustained by strength and daring but a moral community where the authority of the leader is very much constrained by relatively egalitarian ideas about justice. In such a community, the king does not attempt to distinguish himself from his subjects by their dress or in their food and drink, and he gains the support of others only insofar as he coordinates the enforcement of community norms (VI.6.11-12), even as he may be weak and infirm; tendencies to domination are effectively kept in check.

Polybius explains the development of these ideas about justice as the result of spontaneous reflection about reciprocity (VI.6.5-10): because we expect others to reciprocate our good deeds, and value the good deeds of others, norms codifying those expectations emerge, in turn sustaining the authority of those leaders who coordinate their enforcement. Our “natural” ideas of justice are thus quite egalitarian (cf. the use of “democratic” language to describe these norms in all regimes: VI.8.4 πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας, VI.9.4 τὴν ἰσηγορίαν καὶ τὴν παρρησίαν), though they will accommodate some hierarchy to the degree that a leader can enforce them. But Polybius argues that this sort of “egalitarian” kingship is not stable; insofar as kingship becomes hereditary (something that is common, Polybius suggests, due to the popular belief in the inheritability of virtuous dispositions) it develops necessarily into tyranny, i.e., a regime where egalitarian community norms no longer constrain the leader. The increase in the security of the position of the king’s heirs, which comes also as a result of other changes (e.g., the emergence of resources such as fortified places that can be monopolized by the leader), increases their temptations to try to dominate others. They begin by trying to distinguish themselves from the others by dress or other signals (VI.7.7), and end by trying to obtain more material resources and reproductive advantages than anyone else in the community. The basic mechanism of change in the Polybian theory of change appears here for the first time: security of position enhances a human tendency to domination (as I was writing this, I came across this recent piece by Ryan Balot that makes a similar point).

But this tendency to domination is counterbalanced by an apparently equally natural tendency to resent domination in the name of the earlier egalitarian community norms. The “best” men – those who are most high-spirited and resentful of domination – will tend to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in the name of these norms, setting themselves up in their place. As speculative political history and anthropology, this is perhaps not self-evident (why would tyranny necessarily give rise to aristocracy rather than democracy or a renewed kingship?), though in general I think Polybius gets the basic features of long-run political development right, even if modern anthropologists would insist on a finer gradation of steps from the basic primate hierarchy to relatively acephalous egalitarian societies to “big man” societies to the kind of morally constrained “chiefdom” that corresponds to Polybius’ notion of kingship and eventually to tyranny. At any rate, the transition from tyranny to aristocracy does fit the history of Rome well enough (and remember, Polybius is writing a history of the growth of Roman power). But as a depiction of a common political psychology, Polybius’ idea is very much on target, insofar as human nature does seem to contain both tendencies towards domination (at least among males) and tendencies to resent domination, and our “default” social norms are mostly egalitarian.

We could thus say that political change, in the Polybian story, is all about the emergence of egalitarian norms, their violation by individuals capable of accumulating resources, and the restoration of such norms by those outside the “winning coalition” who still value such norms. The pattern is repeated at the next step in the cycle. As time and generations pass, the sons of aristocrats become again secure in their position, and again engage in attempts to dominate others in contravention of community norms: this is the beginning of oligarchy. Polybius describes how these new leaders no longer have any experience of the previous egalitarian norms (ἄπειροι δὲ καθόλου πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας), and have forgotten the misfortunes that led their parents to rise up against tyrants (VI.8.4-5). There is a kind of normative drift: signs of distinction that had been freely given to their parents for their services are interpreted by their sons as things that they deserve naturally, so that the relatively egalitarian norms that had regulated the conduct of their parents no longer regulate their own conduct. What happens instead is that the oligarchs abandon begin to pursue unrestrainedly material and other advantages: they take from others without reciprocating. But the egalitarian norms still remain strong within the rest of the population, and so eventually the people rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, banding behind any leaders who credibly promise to enforce the old moral norms. The people, however, remember with fear both the kings (and their transformation into tyrants) as well as the more recent oligarchs (note the emphasis on memory, which is partly the historian’s domain); they thus decide to manage their affairs by themselves, and democracy is born.

In democracy, as in aristocracy or kingship before, egalitarian norms remain strong as long as some are alive who experienced the previous form of domination; but when the experience is lost (with the grandchildren of the founders of democracy, VI.9.4-5), their influence weakens. People begin to take such norms for granted, and those with resources (the wealthy) begin to attempt to “aim at pre-eminence,” i.e., attempt to dominate others. This competitive struggle among rich individuals sets in motion a process of far-reaching social disintegration, where each wealthy individual corrupts the people by turning their desires in the direction of material accumulation and accustoming them to getting what they want by raiding the wealth of other wealthy individuals. This turns the democracy into a rule of violence (χειροκρατίαν), where multiple demagogic leaders compete to dominate by promising each other’s wealth to the people; the process ends with the masses turning into beasts again (cf. ἀποτεθηριωμένον, VI.9.9), i.e., returning to the state described at the beginning of the cycle, herding like the other animals without real social norms, and eventually getting a new “master,” a new leader who is only limited by his capacity for violence, though under social conditions that are different from those operating at the beginning of the cycle.

In summary, Polybius claims that simple regimes develop according to the following cyclical pattern: pre-social state of nature/natural monarchy->;kingship->;tyranny->;aristocracy->;oligarchy->;democracy->;mob rule/post-social state of nature->;natural despotic monarchy (repeat). This “theory” has sometimes been criticized by modern scholars (see, e.g., von Fritz, p. 84) for its apparently “deterministic” or “rigid” sequence of changes, and indeed Polybius’ presentation is a far cry from the nuanced discussions of political change found in Plato (on which he claims to draw, though Polybius’ discussion is very different from what we find in books VIII and IX of the Republic and in the Statesman) and Aristotle (whose discussions of the problem of political change in book V of the Politics he may not have known, given the possible loss from public view of a lot of Aristotelian writing between the third and the first century ADBC). Moreover, the “theory” of the cycle of regimes sits uneasily with Polybius’ “historical” sensibilities; it is abundantly evident to any observer of historical reality that regimes sometimes change in ways that do not fit a clear pattern (as it was to Aristotle, for example, who criticized – wrongly - Plato for a similar idea). Democracies sometimes turn into oligarchies (as when the Thirty took power in Athens in 404BC), monarchies into democracies, and in general any kind of regime into any other kind, as Aristotle documented in exhaustive detail in book V of the Politics. Writers who knew their Polybius well often tactfully pointed this out after summarizing Polybius’ “theory.” Thus Cicero notes in De Re Publica I.68, after a discussion of regime change that is obviously influenced by Polybius, that regimes tend to change in ways that do not necessarily fit any simple pattern (a remark that is attributed to Scipio, who had been a friend of Polybius in real life), and Machiavelli notes that a community would be unlikely to experience all the stages of change described in the theory before it was taken over by a more stable and better organized state (Discourses I.2 – there is a bit of a puzzle here, for though Machiavelli is clearly describing something like Polybius’ theory, he knew no Greek, and book 6 of Polybius had not been translated at the time). Given that Polybius was not politically or historically naïve, it seems unlikely that these observations would have escaped him.

Yet the criticism is unfair. Polybius explicitly indicates that he is simplifying the “more precise” discussions found in Plato and other philosophers (VI.5.10), which he finds too complicated for pragmatic purposes. The “simplified” theory of the cycle of regimes is not to be taken as an accurate representation of historical reality, but as something like a “model” in the sense in which economists use the term: a distillation of the incentives and other influences affecting the main political actors in a regime, and pragmatically useful as a tool for analyzing political changes in more complex regimes, like the Roman one. (Polybius’ “solution” to the difficulties of the cycle, the “mixed regime,” is also best understood as that sort of model, though that is a subject for another post). These incentives are not simply incentives to behaviour (as in much modern rational choice theorizing) but to character: the model describes how certain characters emerge endogenously from certain regimes, given some assumptions about human nature and about the preservation of historical memory.

What is especially neat about Polybius’ presentation of the “cycle” of regimes is how he ties experience and forgetting with the natural tendencies to both attempt and resent domination in the explanation of political change. Constitutions change for the worse because people forget their experience of earlier attempts of some to dominate others, or rather, because the people who overthrow bad regimes are unable to pass on this experience with sufficient clarity to their children as the children’s position in society becomes increasingly secure. Without real fear of domination (which mostly comes from actual experience of such attempts), egalitarian norms do not survive, a point that applies as much to the newly victorious Rome of Polybius’ time as to other polities. (Incidentally, this seems to indicate that the historian’s role is to remind his audience of these misfortunes, a point argued at some length by Balot with many examples from the rest of the Histories). Thus we have a dialectic between the tendencies to resent domination (which sustain egalitarian norms) and the tendencies to dominate (which corrupt these norms): as one gains the upper hand, it immediately begins to weaken. This dialectic is also a process of corruption: healthy norms are first destroyed among a small elite, then among a larger elite, and finally among the entire people as the historical memory of domination is lost first among the heirs of the monarch, later among the heirs of the larger elite that overthrew the tyrant, and finally among the people themselves through the corrupting effects of the competitive struggle for position among rich individuals. A secure, healthy simple regime is in a sense bad for the education of its leaders, whereas a certain kind of misfortune is a good education, a theme that Polybius emphasizes throughout the Histories.

Ultimately, of course, this “model” of political change is used by Polybius to understand and analyze Roman history: Rome was successful insofar as its leaders instinctively chose courses of action that constantly prevented them from giving full rein to their dominating tendencies (e.g., the “checks and balances” of the Roman mixed constitution, which has, I think, been much misunderstood by modern historians who point out, rightly, that Rome during Polybius’ lifetime was basically an oligarchy; but that is another topic) and will be unsuccessful insofar as it achieves full security (as is evident from the later books of Polybius’ Histories, or at least of what remains of them). The model may be historically implausible (in its assertion that typically tyrannies turn into aristocracies, and oligarchies into democracies, for example) but it is no more implausible than some of the rational choice models of political change in use today (which are useful too, I should note), and it has the added benefit of incorporating a plausible moral psychology. By contrast, Aristotle’s exhaustive description of political change in book V of the Politics, though empirically better informed and starting from a basically plausible principle about how the violation of norms about justice leads to political change (where justice is always understood as a form of equality, though differently in different regimes), seems to miss the forest for the trees. Aristotle spends too much time looking at purely accidental causes of political change (“exogenous shocks” in the contemporary economic jargon, such as foreign conquest or institutional drift), or exploring varieties of a single cause of political change (the attempts to dominate others by high-status individuals), whereas Polybius’ model almost begs to be formalized as a story about the interaction between tendencies to domination and tendencies to resent such domination in the absence of perfect memory about the consequences of domination, and it seems readily applicable to a variety of cases even when it cannot explain them completely. From this point of view, it does not surprise me that Polybius’ simplified story was much more influential, historically, than Aristotle’s complex and empirically informed catalogue of the causes of political change: it identifies a key cause of political change for ill, and suggests ready remedies (basically, keeping the fear of domination alive through “checks and balances,” a remedy that is mentioned by Aristotle as well, but only among many other suggestions, some major, some minor).