Abstract
The article analyses the various logics of different types of decision-making processes: war, strategic bargaining, deliberative negotiation, deliberation, voting, trial, investigation and subsumption. The logics specify relationships between decision situations or constellations of preferences, the character and results of the processes, and problems that may arise. Furthermore, the article presents typical decision-makers and arenas, the bases of legitimacy, and political systems where the respective forms of decision-making are dominant.
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Notes
I thank Peter Munk Christiansen, Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Arild Farsund, Kjell Hausken, Ruth Johnson, Oluf Langhelle, Einar Leknes, Johan P. Olsen and the anonymous referees for useful comments and discussions. They have all been most helpful even though they do not necessarily agree with all of my viewpoints. They are of course not responsible for the remaining shortcomings.
Clearly, March and Olsen would disagree with Anzer in his attempt to develop one general theory of action on the basis of rational choice.
A distinction can be made between beliefs and preferences, but here I use the term preferences as short for both.
Elster (1983: 76, cf. 185ff) makes a ‘basic, but contested, distinction’ between risk and uncertainty: ‘There is risk when the agent has quantifiable degrees of belief, or ‘subjective probabilities’, about the various possible states of the world. […] Uncertainty, on the other hand, arises when the agent is not able to specify any numerical probabilities'. According to Harsanyi (1986: 87), ‘in the case of risk [the decision-maker] will know at least the objective probabilities associated with all possible outcomes. In contrast, in the case of uncertainty, even some or all of these objective probabilities will be unknown to him’. The usage I have chosen is more in line with everyday language: the term risk is used for ‘negative uncertainties’ or uncertainties regarding negative outcomes, while the term opportunities is used for ‘positive uncertainties’ or uncertainties related to positive outcomes.
Arguably, the characterisation of moral norms as absolute could be modified by the distinction between the ethic of consequence and the ethic of intention. Most readers would probably accept that an ethic based on norms that should be followed regardless of their consequences could be characterised as absolute. More debatable is an ethic based on the principle that the actual consequences of the action should be taken into consideration. However, the norms that guide the action after taking the consequences into consideration can be characterised as absolute. The absoluteness of moral and legal norms may also be problematised due to conflicting interpretations in specific cases and the moral dilemmas that occur when conflicting norms are involved. Nevertheless, compromises on what is morally right or wrong or legal/illegal cannot be made in the same way as with divisible goods.
This means that ‘collective preferences’ in my opinion are not preferences in a ‘real’ sense. In the way I have chosen to define preferences, collective preferences can be considered an auxiliary term. It is thus related to the collective actors or organisations that are involved in the actual decision-making process. In other words, I choose to consider collective preferences as a result of earlier decisions in the organisation in question. Such decisions are based on the individual preferences of the organisation members (or leaders).
However, in contemporary wars the distinction between friend and foe, and between combatants and non-combatants, has often been blurred.
I would like to make a reservation here against ‘logrolling’ being perceived as a result of bargaining based on threats and promises and not on good arguments (cf. Elster, 1991: 478). We will revert to this point later in the article.
Cf. Hernes (1971) on Norwegian parliamentary committees and Sartori (1987) on committees in general. However, it appears that parliamentary committees' consensus-creating function has been weakened in recent years and that dissent occurs more often than before in committee recommendations, at least in Scandinavia (Damgaard, 1992; Rommetvedt, 2003).
Intuitively one could expect the formation of coalition governments first and foremost to be a matter of strategic bargaining. However, an analysis of coalition formation in Norway clearly indicates that communicative and deliberative elements are important and that the process could be characterised as deliberative negotiation (Rommetvedt, 1995).
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Rommetvedt, H. the multiple logics of decision-making. Eur Polit Sci 5, 193–208 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210077
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210077