Transforming Power Relationships: Leadership, Risk, and Hope. IHS Political Science Series No. 135, May 2013

Chronic communal conflicts resemble the prisoner’s dilemma. Both communities prefer peace to war. But neither trusts the other, viewing the other’s gain as its own loss, so potentially shared interests often go unrealized. Achieving positive-sum outcomes from apparently zero-sum struggles requires a kind of riskembracing leadership. To succeed leaders must: a) see power relations as potentially positive-sum; b) strengthen negotiating adversaries instead of weakening them; and c) demonstrate hope for a positive future and take great personal risks to achieve it. Such leadership is exemplified by Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk in the South African democratic transition. To illuminate the strategic dilemmas Mandela and de Klerk faced, we examine the work of Robert Axelrod, Thomas Schelling, and Josep Colomer, who highlight important dimensions of the problem but underplay the role of risk-embracing leadership. Finally we discuss leadership successes and failures in the Northern Ireland settlement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Is Power Zero-Sum or Variable-Sum? Old Arguments and New Beginnings

The political and social world in which we live and act is partly constituted by the words we use and the way we use them. What power is and how power works is shaped by what we collectively think it is and how we think it works. This essay revisits the question of whether power should be understood as inherently zero-sum (gains for some entailing equivalent losses for others) or variable-sum (both mutual gains and mutual losses of power are possible). The zero-sum assumption is very old (predating by thousands of years the game-theoretic shorthand) and draws its force from the prevalence of conflict, inequality, and the possibility of violence in political and social life. But the zero-sum view cannot explain the blend of conflict and cooperation characteristic of many important power relations – including the rule-bound political competition of democracy. Challenges to the zero-sum view are relatively recent and in most cases briefly outlined rather than fully-developed. The two most elaborate variable-sum theories, those of Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt, are insightful but flawed. Through critical analysis of power literature on both sides of the zero-sum question (including the “three faces of power” debate, international relations theory, and extended commentary on Parsons and Arendt) the paper attempts to clear the way for a more persuasive variable-sum theory than has hitherto appeared

Constitutionalizing the Dispute: Federalism in Hyper-Partisan Times

This article describes how partisan actors during the Obama years have escalated polarization by transforming policy disputes into constitutional contests over the ground rules of the federal system – contests, moreover, in which one bloc of politically like-minded states opposes another. The article examines in particular how Republicans have supported strong claims of state sovereignty, and in some cases resurrected the antebellum doctrine of nullification, to deny to either Congress or the executive branch the authority to reform state health care markets or to limit states’ emissions of greenhouse gases. Democrats have reinforced the partisan divide by declining to debate the constitutionality of their policies, instead invoking supposedly settled judicial precedent; and by enabling President Obama to create new federal policy through direct negotiation with like-minded states, thus circumventing congressional obstruction. Ironically both parties appear willing to shrink the power and authority of an already diminished Congress, a development with unsettling implications for the future