Damiani, Gianluca

Working Paper
Looking for a "genuine science of politics": William
H. Riker and the game theoretical turn in political
science

CHOPE Working Paper, No. 2022-07

Provided in Cooperation with:

Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University

Suggested Citation: Damiani, Gianluca (2022) : Looking for a "genuine science of politics":
William H. Riker and the game theoretical turn in political science, CHOPE Working Paper, No.
2022-07, Duke University, Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE), Durham, NC,
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4112476

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Looking for a ’genuine Science of Politics’.
William H. Riker and the Game
Theoretical turn in Political Science
Gianluca Damiani

CHOPE Working Paper No. 2022-07

May 2022

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4112476

 Looking for a ’genuine Science of Politics’.
William H. Riker and the Game
Theoretical turn in Political Science
Gianluca Damiani∗

May 17, 2022

Abstract
The paper aims to show how the formal revolution in economics
has influenced the developments of Rational Choice and Game Theory
in Political Science. Our focus will be on American political scientist
William H. Riker (1920-1993). We want to show how Riker used game
theory and adapted it to fulfill his disciplinary agenda, contrasting the
main trends in postwar American Political Science. Our thesis is that,
in doing so, Riker stressed some aspects of the theory that differed
quite sharply from postwar mathematical economics to which game
theory belonged. Sections 1 and 2 describe Riker’s education and in-
tellectual life until the late 1950s, showing how he became acquainted
with game theory and how American political science as a discipline
was changing in that crucial decade. Section 3 presents Riker’s main
arguments in the The Theory of Political Coalitions, focusing on his
working through game theory to produce a suitable model of political
coalition-building. Section 4 discusses some methodological aspects of
Riker’s commitment to game theory and economic analysis. In par-
ticular, we aim to outline and discuss an apparent "dilemma" in his
theoretical production, namely his resting on an outdated idea of eco-
nomics, despite his use of game-theoretic analysis. Finally, Section 5
offers concluding remarks.

Keywords: Game Theory, Political Science, Positive Political Theory,

William H. Riker
JEL Classification: B16, B21, B29, B31

Introduction
Although game theory now occupies a central role in the toolkit of economic
theorists, a remarkable feature of its history is that in the 1950s, 1960s, and
∗
Ph.D. Candidate, UniFI-UniTO. e-mail: gianluca_damiani@hotmail.it. I want to ac-
knowledge Professor Giocoli, who is supervising my Ph.D. dissertation. Professor Lapidus
and Arena, who read a previous version of this work at the 2021 Eshet Summer School
in Paris, providing useful insights. And Catherine Herfeld, who similarly read a previous
version of this work. The people at the Storep Conference (2020), Eshet (2021) and Hes
(2021), who read and commented the previous versions of this working paper. Finally,
special thanks to all the professors, the Staff, and the fellows at the Center for the History
of Political Economy at Duke, with which I had a lot of valuable exchanges in the eight
months I spent there. I also want to acknowledge the Staff of the Rare Collection at
Rubinstein Library for having assisted my research, and finally, the Staff at the Rochester
University Library.
Center for the History of Political Economy Working Papers are the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Center or of Duke University.
1

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1970s, this approach struggled to enter the economics mainstream. However,
in a discipline striving to develop a formal, truly scientific, and possibly uni-
fied methodological canon, such as the 1950s Political Science, the kind of
formal theory initially proposed by John von Neumann & Oskar Morgen-
stern was immediately perceived by some scholars as the ideal tool-box of
methods, notions, and techniques. This aspect also points to another re-
markable feature of game theory. Namely, it was a tool capable of being
exploited across different disciplinary domains other than economics. This
paper shows that in the 1950s and 1960s, game theory occupied a central
place in a definite intellectual agenda, and this was not part of economics
but political science instead.
Such a push for the adoption of game theory outside economics had its
roots in some reviews of von Neumann & Morgenstern’s opus (Neumann
and Morgenstern 2007) like Herbert Simon’s one (Simon 1945). For what
concerns political science, the 1950s saw some early results obtained through
the so-called "cooperative game theory," like those by the future Nobelist
Lloyd Shapley and fellow economist Martin Shubik (Shapley and Shubik
1954). These must be added to the well-known attempts to use the theory
of games in international relations. (Kaplan 1957; Schelling 1980) However,
it was thanks to the commitment of a political scientist, William H. Riker,
that game theory became the primary tool of the attempt to develop a truly
scientific political science. As Riker wrote in the first chapter of his most
ambitious theoretical work, The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), "the
main hope for a genuine science of politics lies in the discovery and use of
an adequate model of political behavior." (Riker 1962b, p. 9). Such a model
to him was eminently game theoretical.
From Riker’s dedication, a long line of academic research in political
science, which he defined as "Positive Political Theory," was established,
where decision theory, game theory, and a rigorous formal fashion in assessing
political phenomena represented the methodological canon to be adopted.
(Amadae and Mesquita 1999; Riker and Ordeshook 1973)1
Riker’s story fills different narratives, to which this paper aims to con-
tribute. The first is the History of Game Theory and, more generally, postwar
mathematical economics, following the trail blazed by the works of Wein-
traub, Giocoli, and Leonard, among the others (see: Weintraub 1992; Wein-
traub 2002; Giocoli 2003b; Leonard 2010). To these works must be added the
reconstructions of the development of the postwar American Social Sciences,
and the notion of "cold-war" social sciences (see: Amadae 2003; Erickson
2015; Erickson et al. 2015; Hauptmann 1996). Finally, the development of
American political science has been explored in many historical works. In-
deed the dramatic changes that occurred in the discipline in the Postwar
1
"Positive Political Theory" was the name adopted by Riker yet in the 1950s. It
will later become the standard label to define this subfield of political science. Riker’s
approach has also been labeled sometimes as the "rational choice approach" in political
science due to the emphasis put on methodological individualism and rationality. Besides,
an important aspect of this story that is not discussed here is Riker’s role as an ’intellectual
entrepreneur" within the academic community of political scientists. Indeed, he did not
just advance a methodological as well as theoretical agenda but was tireless in building up
a group of scholars who shared his view. This came mainly from Riker’s role in chairing
the department of political science at the University of Rochester from 1962 to 1977, and
especially in establishing a Ph.D. program, to which such scholars like Peter C. Ordeshook,
Kenneth Shepsle, Richard D. McKelvey, John Aldrich, among the others, joined, namely
some of the most important political scientists which employed formal theory in their
works.

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years (both in terms of its institutionalization and theoretical developments)
framed Riker’s intellectual enterprise. Then, in the 1950s, a young generation
of political scientists, like David Easton, Robert Dahl, and David Truman,
among the others, challenged the traditional approaches to political studies
(history and law), advancing a plea for more empirical and quantitative anal-
ysis. Such a movement is known as the "behavioral revolution" in Political
Sciences. (Dahl 1961; Somit and Tanenhaus 1967; Adcock 2009; Adcock and
Bevir 2006)
Riker’s story fits all these narratives since he was a political scientist
doing political theory when such "behavioral revolution" occurred. Riker
indeed joined the "protest" against traditional political science, but not the
revolution as a whole, focusing mainly on some tenets like the "plea" for
objectivity in political theory. In doing so, he explicitly saw economics as
a role model and adopted game theory. Therefore, this paper also aims to
contribute to the ongoing literature about the various attempts to extend
the economics toolkit outside its traditional boundaries, closely following
other works (see, for example, Medema 2000; Medema 2013; Fleury 2010).
We intend to show that Riker’s case was not a simple transfer of tools from
one domain to another. The American political scientist indeed stressed
those aspects of economic theory that fit his scientific political science idea.
However, he interpreted economics, especially its methodology, differently
from what postwar mathematical economics was becoming.
Riker’s use of game theory and formal analysis was strictly influenced
by his being a political scientist working within the political scientist’ com-
munity. Then, whereas the development of game theory deeply affected the
way the Postwar economists used to address theoretical problems, both in
terms of mathematical sophistication and how they interpreted economic
knowledge, Riker saw game theory differently. To him, this tool enhanced
a strong predictive power, and his employment of it is justified on the basis
of a robust positivistic attitude, which resembles Milton Friedman’s case for
"positive economics," but also the "nomological-deductive" approach. How-
ever, it is well known that such positions were far from being the main force
that fuelled economics’ radical postwar mathematization. This, in our eyes,
represents a sort of "dilemma" that, as it will become apparent, Riker was
not really able to solve. This work explores why Riker chose such a method-
ological point of view and how this affected his use of game theory or the
immediate suitability of his model. In a nutshell, our thesis is that Riker
presented to political scientists a relatively less sophisticated image of eco-
nomics than what economics was becoming in the postwar years, and we try
to advance some explanations for this.
Section 1 and 2 describes Riker’s education and intellectual life until
the late 1950s and how he became acquainted with game theory. Section 3
presents Riker’s main arguments in The Theory of Political Coalitions, fo-
cusing on his working through game theory to produce a suitable model of
political coalition-building. Riker’s argument in this work was not mathe-
matical nor axiomatic. Thus it is very different from the high theoretical
game theory development in the 1950s (think of Princeton and RAND the-
orists). Consequently, it does not occupy a central place in the history of
the development of game theory qua theory. However, it had an important
role in how game theoretical ideas crossed domains different from economics.
Section 4 discusses Riker’s relations with economic theory and outlines his
methodological "dilemma." Finally, Section 5 offers concluding remarks.

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1 William H. Riker’s education and early works
William Harrison Riker was born in Iowa in 1920 and grew up in Michigan
and later in Indiana, where his father, in the years of the Great Depression,
established a bookstore.2 He enrolled at DePauw University (IN), where he
obtained a B.A. in Economics in 1942, and later spent some time during
the war working for the RCA (Radio Corporation of America). Riker, in his
remarks, attributed influence to these undergraduate studies in economics
only for what concerns the ’mindset’ of economics and not for the specific
training he received. Furthermore, it is likely that the general undergrad-
uate education in economics at the time, especially in a relatively small
private provincial college like DePauw, was of low interest and low quality
(and devoid of any theoretical inclination). After having completed his un-
dergraduate studies, he decided to apply for Graduate School in Political
Science. Riker recollected that his set of possible choices comprised Harvard
University, Columbia, and Chicago, namely, "[t]he three schools that were
producing substantial numbers of political scientists at the time" (Riker and
K. Shepsle 1979, p. 36). Especially the latter was associated with Charles
Merriam and the "Chicago School of Political Science," who put much em-
phasis on empirical methods and quantitative analysis. (On the "Chicago
School" see: Heaney and Hansen 2006) Thus, his political science professor
at DePauw, Harold Zink, advised him to apply to Chicago. However, at the
time, Riker was influenced by the writings of E. Pendleton Herring, a profes-
sor at Harvard. Therefore he decided to enroll there in 1945. Herring was a
generation younger than Merriam but followed him in advocating scientific
methods in social sciences and had a pivotal institutional role in develop-
ing the "Social Sciences Research Council," which he chaired from 1948 to
1968.(Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, 36 et ss)3
Young Riker’s Harvard experience is extremely interesting to properly
understand the state of Political Science in the late 1940s and 1950s. In
2
One can derive information about Riker’s life and career from the brief biographical
memoir written by two scholars connected to him, Kenneth Shepsle and Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita. The former obtained a Ph.D. in Political Science at Rochester in 1970 and
was among the first Riker’s graduate students. Bueno de Mesquita instead did not attend
Rochester Graduate School, but he arrived as a professor in 1972 and was very close to
Riker. They wrote this memoir for the biographical series of the National Academy of
Science, to which Riker belonged since 1975 (Bueno de Mesquita and K. Shepsle 2001).
It offers exciting accounts of Riker’s personality and family life and his role as teacher
and mentor, but, given the nature of the series, the general tone is sometimes acquiescent
and celebratory. In addition, Riker himself offered some different historical accounts of
intellectual development (Riker 1992;Riker 1997). There, he aimed to present a general
reconstruction of his academic experience, especially concerning applying Game Theory
in political science. Hence, his narrative is often generic and not precise, at least from
a historiographical point of view. The most interesting source for reconstructing Riker’s
life is certainly the long and detailed interview Riker gave to Shepsle in 1979 as part of
the ’Political Science Oral History Program. This program started in the late 1970s to
preserve the experiences of major figures in the development of American political science
to the benefit of future historians and practitioners of the discipline. (Riker and K. Shepsle
1979) This 150 typed pages interview spanned from graduate and undergraduate education
reminiscences to theoretical and methodological issues.
3
E. Pendleton Herring (1903-2004) was an American political scientist, a generation
younger than Merriam but followed him in advocating scientific methods in social sci-
ences. Besides, he also was strongly involved in the institutionalization of the discipline in
the Postwar, chairing the "Social Sciences Research Council" from 1948 to 1968. Dahl, in
particular, considered the "Social Science Research Council" one of the "six specific, inter-
related, quite powerful stimuli" that backed the development of the "behavioral approach"
in political science. (Herring 1947;Dahl 1961, 763 et ss.)

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particular, it can be seen as a proxy of the problematic relationship between
younger and innovative scholars within the unsatisfactory framework of a
consolidated discipline. He arrived at Harvard before the period of intense
methodological development and commitment to the quantitative method
he would later define as "the ferment of the 1950s," which coincided mainly
with the ’behavioral revolution’ in political science and the development of
new quantitative and qualitative analyses. (Riker 1997) At Harvard, in the
1940s, instead, the approach followed even by scholars more committed to
the scientific method like Herring was mainly that of case studies, with a
particular focus on public administration. Otherwise, the other important
strand of research was the History of Political Ideas. Whereas Riker dis-
missed the earlier as "simply artistic investigations of events" (Riker and
K. Shepsle 1979, p. 39), the latter instead embodied what David Easton, at
the time Riker’s fellow graduate student at Harvard, defined as the "histori-
cist attitude in modern political theory," equally opposed to empirical and
theoretical analysis. (Easton 1951) In Riker’s own words, such a historicist
attitude was defined as follows: "The idea was to have a clever interpretation
of some event or a clever interpretation of some historical development and
not to have a scientific approach to politics." (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979,
p. 45) To his eyes, its main representative at Harvard was the famous ger-
man scholar Carl J. Friedrich, about whom he spent some harsh words in
the interview with Shepsle.(Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 41) In reality, in
the pre-behavioral era, Friedrich was among the few scholars interested in
setting empirical research within an original theoretical framework by estab-
lishing a theory of power. Consequently, he was pretty dismissive, as Riker
was, of simplistic empirical analysis. But to Riker, Friedrich’s work, equally
hostile toward any general description of political events, was without any
usefulness in establishing a science of politics.
Riker concluded his Ph.D. in 1947 with a fairly classical case study dis-
sertation titled The CIO in Politics. 1936-1946 (under the supervision of
Merle Fainsod). (Fellman 1947. The "Congress of Industrial Organization"
was a former American trade union federation). In general, Graduate School
experience did not satisfy him, and this mirrored the discipline’s scientific
and intellectual state. On the one hand, there were people like Herring (to
whom Riker felt personally close) who pursued interesting practical analysis
but with totally wrong methodologies and devoid of theoretical exploration.
On the other hand, people like Friedrich defended the case for a theoretical
discipline, but at the expense of any practical purpose, at least to Riker.
In such an intellectual environment, the "Behavioral revolution" occurred in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. It originated from the same intellectual con-
cerns and dissatisfaction with the present state of political science Riker and
other young scholars had. Take, for instance, the aforementioned Easton,
whose work will be pivotal in its development. (Adcock 2009) He remarked,
in an interview given for the ’Political Science Oral History Program,’ that
"by the time I left Harvard, I just didn’t know what political science was all
about." (Interview to D.Easton, in Baer, Jewell, and Sigelman 1991, p. 199)
These words are extraordinarily similar to that of Riker. Indeed he stated
that "people go out of Harvard without having any sense of doing anything
in political science" (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 48) and he "had no sense
of what one did as a scholar in political science when I got through and
finally [got a] Ph.D. [at] Harvard." (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 44)
The main tenets of the "Behavioral revolution" entailed the emphasis

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on prediction and the explanation of political issues. These were based on
observation and data collection, the development of interdisciplinary and
"self-conscious criticism’" about its methods and results. But also on pure
research, leaving aside any normative aspiration to establish the "truth or fal-
sity of values" like democracy, freedom, or equality, which are not amenable
to scientific validation. Theoretical development occupied an important role
in orienting and directing research. (Somit and Tanenhaus 1967) But this
did not represent an explicit unified paradigm or set of theories. Instead, in
the words of Robert Dahl, "Those who were sometimes called ’behavioralist’
[. . . ] shared a mood: a mood of skepticism about the current intellectual at-
tainments of political science, a mood of sympathy toward ’scientific’ modes
of investigation and analysis, a mood of optimism about the possibilities
of improving the study of politics". (Dahl 1961, p. 255) Up to conclude
that "[. . . ]’ the behavioral approach’ might better be called the ’behavioral
mood’ or perhaps even the ’scientific outlook’" (Dahl 1961, p. 258). Besides,
according to Riker, an important point was also occupied by reformist goals
and practical interest in public affairs, which animated the young political
scientists. (Riker 1997)
Riker certainly shared such a mood but focused his attention more on the
theoretical aspects rather than on the empirical analyses carried forward by
behavioralists like Dahl or David Truman. Indeed, despite resting on more
sophisticated methods than before, especially about statistical estimations
(although far less advanced than incipient econometrics), the methodology
of political theory was to him still grounded on flawed and unspecified ways
of reasoning. This flaws became apparent to him after he published his
textbook on the American political system, Democracy in the United States
(Riker 1953), primarily based on his teaching course in American politics at
Lawrence College (WI), where he worked between 1949 and 1961. (Riker and
K. Shepsle 1979, p. 50) In his vivid account, working on this book led him to
rethink the foundations of political science. In fact, after having published
it, he started to realize that "it would be hard to say that any sentence in
it was true." (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 60) Indeed "I began to think
that once you raise the question of what can you do to bring a particular
moral position into some sort of effective institutional operation, why you
also raise the question of whether or not institutions accomplish what they
are intended to accomplish" (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 2). Therefore,
entailing an answer to these questions needed more than a normative stance
and more than a plain description of how institutions work.
In Riker’s mind, the issue at stake became that of ascertaining what po-
litical science is and if utter, or not, true sentences. Therefore, in his case,
the strongest incentive to develop his intellectual agenda was the perceived
need for a rigorous foundation of the methodological premises of the disci-
pline. To pursue this ambitious aim, Riker started reading the philosophy
of science and logic. But he soon realized that logic bore more on the valid-
ity of argument than its truth content. So, he paralleled these studies with
more applied mathematical courses (linear algebra and Calculus) before dis-
covering von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior around the mid-fifties. (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, 5 et ss.).

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2 The "ferment of the 1950s": Riker meets game
theory
Riker recalled that "[...] von Neumann’s book was the one that really turned
me on because it seemed to me that there were some generalizations there
that [...] one could look at in nature and see if those generalizations turned
out to be true." (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 5). Clearly, it was an in-
timidating book, especially for a political scientist with little math training.
However, Riker felt confident to grasp the most important results from it,
and, as we will show in the following section, he developed his theory of
political coalitions entirely out of von Neumann & Morgenstern, and not on
other results of cooperative game theory.
Riker quickly became "something of a publicist" for Game Theory in
political science. For example, he insisted that the political theory panel at
the "Midwest Conference of Political Scientists" at the University of Michi-
gan, Ann Arbor (April 1958) was devoted to Game Theory, paralleling more
traditional issues. (Harry Davis to Riker, January 10, 1958, WHRP, Box
18, Folder 2) On that occasion, Riker presented a brief working paper that
exposed some game theory principles for political analysis to fellow political
scientists. ("Contribution of Game Theory to Political Theory" (mimeo),
Riker 1958b) He started by addressing some difficulties applying game the-
ory in political science, commencing with political scientists’ lack of math-
ematical training. Nevertheless, he stated, the game-theoretical approach
had much relevance to politics since "the category of zero-sum, two-person
games is clearly a model for those political situations in which two persons
are each trying to do the other in. [...] The n-person game is clearly a model
of the contemporary nation-state system of the free market of classical econ-
omy or of legislatures with undisciplined parties." (Riker 1958b, pp. 2–3). In
doing so, he stressed the normative features of the theory over the descrip-
tive analyses usually outlined in political science. Riker concluded his brief
exposition with a simple game-theoretical model of the "balance of power
system." A "balance of power system" in international relations assumes
that to avoid the system’s collapse each member opposes anyone who gains
a predominance position. Riker showed that game theory could carry this
idea one step further. With three coalitions, two opposing and a neutral
one, he looked for those situations where the neutral’s interest was to join
the strongest coalition (so destroying the balance), and those where it was
dominant be otherwise.4
When Riker’s path crossed game theory, in the second half of the 1950s,
some scholars had made key refinements upon the original theory of von
Neumann & Morgenstern so that this now was labeled as "cooperative game
theory," juxtaposed to the "non-cooperative" one. In a nutshell, cooper-
ative game theory refers to the presence of coalitions, where communica-
tion and, therefore, binding agreements are possible. On the other hand,
4
Riker’s oversimplified model assumed two opposing coalitions and a neutral one.
Therefore there are two possible outcomes: the neutral coalition joins the weakest op-
posing coalition, and the balance of power is maintained; otherwise, the neutral coalition
merges with the strongest one, and the balance system is broken. By using Shapley &
Shubik’s power index, Riker computed the power of each coalition. Then he showed how
much each coalition should offer to the neutral one to ally with it. Besides, Riker also
attempted to display the best strategy for the neutral coalition. However, his model is far
from being detailed and general, and even his employment of the power indices is a very
special case, with arbitrary values.

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non-cooperative theory refers to situations where players cannot communi-
cate with others. Both these situations entail strategic and rational choice
considerations, but the rules of the game and, therefore, the solutions are
different. Princeton Mathematician John Nash was the first to introduce
this distinction. He, differently from what von Neumann and Morgenstern
had done in their original 1944 work, treated a case where it is "assumed
that each participant acts independently, without the collaboration of com-
munication with any of the others" (Nash 2002b) (viz. where coalitions are
not permitted). Nash famously defined such games as "Non-Cooperative
Games." The earlier games addressed in TGEB came therefore to be labeled
as "Cooperative Games."5
In the cooperative case, the fundamental issue is that of choosing which
coalition to join, given each player’s expectations regarding the payoffs, what
he will obtain by selecting a coalition over another (through "side pay-
ments"), and finally, which partition of the game represents the solution
to it. Besides, in this case, there are mutiple notions of solution, each with
axiomatic and substantive properties that make them acceptable, both from
a mathematical and rational point of view. To von Neumann & Morgenstern,
for n-person zero-sum games, each coalition’s worth can be represented by
a "Characteristic Function," and what each coalition gives its members by
a vector, defined as "imputation." Due to their vectorial nature, each impu-
tation can be related to another, using the notion of "dominance." Then, a
solution for a n-person game is offered by the set of all imputations that do
not dominate each other and dominate all the imputations outside this set
(this was called the "Stable Set"). However, this was not the only solution
for such games. Other ideas came out, stressing one property or another
of the definition of cooperative games (as the "Shapley Value," discussed
below).
In 1954, Martin Shubik, a young economist who studied under Morgen-
stern at Princeton and was perhaps the only economist deeply interested
in Game Theory, edited a brief collection of essays exploring the theory of
games in political behavior. (Shubik 1954; Shubik 1992)6 The same year,
Shubik, together with Lloyd Shapley, a Princeton and RAND mathemati-
cian7 published, in the leading journal of American political science, The
American Political Science Review a short theoretical work addressing the
everlasting issue of political power, using cooperative game theory. (Shapley
and Shubik 1954)
They defined power as the chance, represented by a "Power Index," each
5
It must be noted that Nash, in his last contribution to GT, advanced an attempt to
establish the "non-cooperative" foundations of "cooperative games," presenting a model
of bargaining where the determination of the bargaining solution was obtained through
a non-cooperative threat game. (Nash 2002c). An entire research program, the so-called
"Nash Program," was derived, especially from the 1980s onward, after John Harsanyi and
Reinhardt Selten invented some pivotal extensions and refinements of Nash Equilibrium
6
This brief volume contained the pages where von Neumann and Morgenstern discussed
the meaning of the notion of solution verbally; some reviews of TGEB; some research ap-
plication of game theory to military problems ("The Colonel Blotto’s game"), and finally,
although not, strictly speaking, game-theoretical analyses, the first pages of Arrow’s work
on social choice, where he presented voting as a problem of collective choice, and Black’s
1950 paper about the "unity between economics and political science."
7
Shapley was a Princeton Mathematics Ph.D. who worked at RAND during the 1960s
and 1970s, providing critical applications of cooperative GT and non-cooperative as well.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. For biographical information:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2012/shapley/facts/

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committee member has of being critical to the success of a winning coalition.
(Shapley and Shubik 1954, p. 787) The authors conceived their method as
a first step to addressing such problems as designing the size and type of
legislative bodies, protecting minority interests, and even finding a criterion
for "fair representation." Their analysis does not consider any sociological or
political superstructure in a legislature; nevertheless, they argued, it could
help set up norms or standards, "the departure from which will serve as a
measure of, for example, political solidarity or regional or sociological fac-
tionalism in an assembly." (Shapley and Shubik 1954, p. 791). This index
represents the apriori chance for each committee member to be pivotal for
a minimal winning coalition. Then, one can interpret Shapley and Shubik’s
power index as a "technical definition of power" compared to the popular
analysis of power, namely, the ownership and use of resources or the act of
domination or influence of some individuals over others.
In a formal, although not axiomatic way, their model can be summed in
the ensuing terms:8 given a voting body of n-members and a rule to define
victory in a vote (for instance simple majority rule, (n+1)
2 if n is odd, or n2 +1
if n is even), members vote according to a sequence. Letting n! the total
number of these sequences 9 , and defining a Minimal winning coalition, that
is a coalition such that, if one member is subtracted, then it is not winning
anymore, the member who transforms a coalition from losing to winning in
a sequence is said to be a "pivot" (this means that the marginal value of the
vote after n2 + 1 is zero).10 Therefore, concerning each member i, the power
index Pi is the ratio between the number of sequences in which i pivots and
n! (where ni=1 Pi = 1).11 Such a result is elaborated upon what is perhaps
P

Shapley’s most famous contribution to game theory, viz. the value named
after him, a general solution for n-person games, with transferable utility
and binding agreements. (Shapley 1953)12
In a late reminiscence, Riker attributed Shapley & Shubik’s paper a piv-
otal role in catalyzing his interest in game theory. (Riker 1992) Then, he
8
This is the summary made by Riker in his 1959 paper. See below.
9
This means the factorial of n: n × (n − 1) × (n − 2) × . . . 2 × 1
10
As Shapley and Shubik wrote: "Put in crude economic terms, the above implies that
if votes of senators were for sale, it might be worthwhile buying forty-nine of them, but
the market value of the fiftieth (to the same customer) would be zero." (Note that in 1954
U.S.Senate comprised 97 members.) (Shapley and Shubik 1954
11
In simple terms, think of a group of individuals who must vote for some bill in a given
order. As soon as a majority is reached, the bill is passed, and the last member who voted
is given credit. If the order of voting is chosen randomly, one can compute the frequency
with which a member belongs to a group of voters, and the frequency of a member is
pivotal. Then an index can be construed, which measures the number of times that the
action of the individual changes the state of affairs. If this formal model is applied to a
committee chairman’s tie-breaking function, in an odd committee, he is pivotal as often
as an ordinary member; in an even committee, he is never pivotal. Then, for instance,
applied to the case of the US Senate in the 1950s, the power index of the US vice-president
1
was equal to 97 (96 + 1)
12
Unlike von Neumann and Morgenstern’s "stable set" and the "core," which also ap-
plied to similar games, the Shapley Value is not based on stability considerations. Instead,
it entails the players’ "reasonable expectation of reward," based on an apriori evaluation
of the entire game. Namely, the value added to every coalition by a player is multiplied by
the a priori probability that the coalition will form. The players’ Shapley values constitute
a unique payoff vector as the game’s solution. (Roth 1988; Taylor 1971). As Riker and
Ordeshook stated: "The V -solution is inferred from the characteristic function in answer
to the question: how might players in each coalition be expected to divide its value? On
the other hand, the Shapley value is inferred from the characteristic function in answer
to the question: how much might players expect to win, given various possibilities of
coalitions?" Riker and Ordeshook 1973, p. 163

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summed up the importance of their result: "Most persons who have tried to
analyze power have interpreted it as the ability of one person to make another
person do something the other would not otherwise do. While I have deep
reservations about this (and most other definitions of Power [Riker 1962]),
it is clear that Shapley’s definition is quite different. It involves not the abil-
ity to control persons but the ability to control outcomes through being the
pivot or the marginal person between winning and losing coalitions: the last
added member of a minimal winning coalition." (Riker 1992, p. 212)
Not surprisingly, the first paper Riker devoted entirely to game theory
was an attempt to assess Shapley and Shubik’s result empirically. (Riker
1959a) In particular, he interpreted their result as the assumption that peo-
ple seek to maximize their power. Therefore, their preference for joining a
coalition over another is led by this "maximization principle." 13 However, as
Riker pointed out, even if it could be demonstrated that each member raised
his power by moving from one coalition to another, it could be impossible
to prove that this was the leading motive behind his decision. Furthermore,
Riker’s empirical test simply consisted of computing, through the roll-call
of the French Legislative Assembly, how the power of each member who
switched his side changed after his migration, and the final empirical assess-
ment was uncertain at most.
From Shapley and Shubik’s power index, a vast literature emerged, which
applied this and other similar indices to legislatures, committee decisions,
or even to the analysis of fairness criterion. (Straffin 1994) However, when
Riker made his ambitious attempt to provide a full-breadth game-theoretical
analysis of political coalitions, he took from Shapley and Shubik only the
notion of a "minimum winning coalition." Instead, he rested on the original
analysis of von Neumann and Morgenstern. Moreover, he explicitly rejected
any definition of rationality in terms of "maximization of power."
A decisive step in Riker’s commitment to formal analysis was provided
by the year (1960-1) he spent as a fellow at the "Center for the advanced
studies in behavioral sciences" (CASBS) at the University of Stanford. The
Center was established in 1954, thanks to the funding of the Ford Founda-
tion, and quickly became part of the set of non-academic institutions that
shaped the "cold war rationality." (Amadae 2003, pp. 78–9; Erickson et al.
2015). The Center was well-funded and gave many opportunities for inter-
disciplinary research in social sciences, displaying, therefore, a less hawkish
attitude toward game theory and formal analysis than, say, RAND. Then,
among the lists of fellows, we find political scientists, sociologists, economists,
psychologists, historians, jurists, and philosophers.14 Furthermore, it filled
exactly the research opportunities Riker was looking for. Indeed, as he wrote
in a letter to Ralph W. Tyler, a renowned educator who was the CASBS’
first director, Riker aimed to develop "a new formal or mathematical polit-
ical science" and "to attempt to formulate some mathematical statements
about coalitions and to devise tests of the adequacy of these statements."
(Riker to Tyler, June 22, 1959, WHRP, Box 10, folder 1) It was at Stanford
that Riker wrote a significant part of his book on political coalitions, but
he also explored the other main strands of formal political theory, namely
social choice and voting paradoxes, after the pivotal contributions made by
13
Note, however, that in the original paper by Shapley and Shubik, no such strong
maximization hypothesis was advanced
14
The CASBS is still an active research center. One can consult a comprehensive list of
fellows in decades on its site. Among them, eight future Nobel prizes in Economics

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Duncan Black, Anthony Downs, and especially Kenneth Arrow (who was
a professor at Stanford, and a CASBS’ member). (Black 1958; Kenneth J
Arrow 1962; Riker 1961)
Despite the time spent at the CASBS, there are no clues that Riker was
much in touch with the community of game theorists in the 1950s. In general,
with very few exceptions, the intellectual communities of economists, polit-
ical scientists, and game theorists remained disjoint. The game theorists’
community was made up, in the 1950s, of young mathematicians interested
in the most abstract developments more than in practical employment. In
places like RAND, the emphasis was allegedly put on the applied strand
of game theory, e.g., its use in strategic and international political issues,
but pure theoretical research was easily funded even there. In that commu-
nity, not surprisingly, Riker was an outsider, lacking the necessary advanced
mathematical capabilities needed to produce new mathematical theoreti-
cal developments. Furthermore, political scientists at RAND were anyway
much interested in issues like nuclear deterrence or, in general, strategic
analysis (the most notable case was that of Albert Wohlstetter, but also
Thomas Schelling spent research time at RAND. Amadae 2003). Riker’s
focus on a well-defined issue, coalition formation in politics, and within a
well-defined framework, namely "cooperative game theory," may explain his
distance from game theorists and, more generally, from those dealing with
international politics. But the most crucial reason for his being an outsider
was perhaps that Riker was advancing his theoretical agenda by advocating
game theory. This agenda differed considerably from traditional approaches
in political science as well as from the most recent "behavioral revolution."
Meanwhile, it was not easy to be integrated into the actual developments of
game theory due to Riker’s mathematical difficulties.
In the aforementioned interview with Shepsle, when asked if he ever sent
any of his ideas to contemporary game theorists, Riker remembered only
Duncan MacRae, whose response filled with detailed criticisms is not, unfor-
tunately, among Riker’s papers stored at Rochester.(Riker and K. Shepsle
1979, p. 14) Another equally interesting proof of his being an outsider among
the community of game theorists can be found in Oskar Morgenstern’s pa-
pers at Duke University. (Morgenstern n.d. Box 83) Riker completed The
Theory of Political Coalitions in 1961 and sent the manuscript to Princeton
University Press and Yale University Press. At Princeton, Morgenstern was
extremely critical, rejecting its publication. (Shubik n.d. Box 8) Indeed, in
a letter sent to Gordon Hubel (who was press editor at PUP), Morgenstern
wrote: "The basic attempt is very laudable, and nobody doubts that Game
Theory will influence Political Science vary considerably, but the execution
leaves much to be desired." (Morgenstern to Hubel, August 16, 1961, Mor-
genstern n.d. Box 83) He continued: "Even the outline of Game Theory
itself is full of misunderstandings and gaps. A reader not acquainted with
Game Theory would not understand the exposition, and one already famil-
iar with it would quickly spot the error". Morgenstern attributed the poor
mathematical quality of Riker’s manuscript to his having worked by himself
and advanced the suggestion to establish some cooperation with a real game
theorist or spend some time obtaining a specific education in it. In fact,
before writing his comment, he tried to detect who Riker was and what were
his education, capabilities, and scientific research, but without obtaining any
meaningful information. Finally, to remark on his point, he stated that "I
am sure that anyone else who is at home in Game Theory and who would

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see this manuscript, perhaps given to him by some other publisher, would
come to the same conclusion." (Morgenstern to Hubel, cit.)
Despite Morgenstern’s harsh criticism and last remark, another refereeing
was more supportive. Yale University Press contacted Martin Shubik at
the end of June 1961 with the proposal of reading and making a referee
(anonymously) of Riker’s manuscript. (Marian Neal Ash to Shubik, June
30, 1961, MSP, Box 8)15 For many aspects, the request made by YUP was
not surprising since Shubik, as seen, was one of the few people involved in
elaborating n-person Game Theory. Furthermore, although he divided his
research activities between RAND and his work as an applied economist for
important corporations (especially IBM and General Electric), he was also
associated with Yale University. Indeed in 1961, he was visiting there, and
he would become a full professor in 1963, spending all his career in New
Haven.
Shubik began his report praising Riker’s manuscript: "This manuscript
is well worth publishing. It will make a rather controversial book containing
several imaginative ideas." Moreover, "its worth depends upon an imagina-
tive insight concerning the application of the methodology of game theory to
the subject matter of political science." (Shubik 1961, p. 1) This, in his own
eyes, can prevent the "unfair criticism" that political scientists and game
theorists would have likely levied on technical grounds.
This point is interesting and deserves attention: Shubik’s appraisal of
Riker’s work and his defense from "unfair criticism" rests more upon method-
ological aspects, that is, the employment of Game Theory in political science,
than on technical grounds. In fact, he judged Riker’s argument about mini-
mum winning coalition "too verbal for one part of his audience and probably
may not be sufficiently verbal for the other part." Besides, it is not clear,
Shubik stated, to which extent Riker’s resting upon previous literature (like
the work of Raiffa and the work of Vickrey about coalitions) suited political
theory.
Focusing on the detailed comments on manuscripts, the only substantial
analysis advanced by Shubik is about what seems to him too much emphasis
on the zero-sum model. To his eyes, much of Riker’s analysis would also
hold in a non-zero-sum game, mainly because the most crucial feature of his
game-theoretic analysis is the indeterminate temporal length. In contrast,
zero-sum is well defined only for a small finite part of the game. Instead,
the main feature is the opposition of interest, which is a prerogative of a
zero-sum (and constant sum) game and in a "more or less strictly competi-
tive non-constant sum game." (Shubik 1961, p. 2) Other comments are less
substantial, although still interesting, like contesting that "Side Payments"
has an underlying reference to money, as stated by Riker (although Shubik
admitted that this is a common misconception of Game Theory). Still re-
lated to this is the remark that "to include threats as a form of side payments
leads to a rather poor modeling of human affairs." Because "the result of a
threat may be a rather low personal payoff to an individual. However, the
threat itself is more properly a part of a strategy". (Shubik 1961, p. 4)
Shubik recommended Riker’s manuscript for publishing, even with only
editing corrections. Interestingly, he also advanced some forecasts about
this work’s reception: "The odds are that it will receive very mixed reviews,
including several very favorable and several highly unfavorable comments.
15
Riker never knew that his referee was Shubik, although he imagined it. See Riker and
K. Shepsle 1979, p. 14

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It is certainly not going to make any "best seller’ list. However, it should
make a worthwile (sic) contribution to the development of political science."
(Shubik 1961, p. 4)
As stated above, Shubik’s name was not attached to the referee report.
Besides, there is no sign of correspondence between Shubik and Riker before
and even after the refereeing process. Moreover, given the vagueness of the
comments and the fact that they were about to the manuscript version, un-
aivalable in the archives, of Riker’s book, it is not easy to detect if they were
effectively accepted by Riker.16 Notwithstanding, this report is interesting
for many reasons. From the historian’s point of view, it represents a con-
vincing appraisal of Riker’s work, made by one of the leading game theorists
of his time. Shubik was perhaps the best choice to evaluate Riker’s work.
As he repeatedly stated, his leading talent rested more on being an eco-
nomic model builder than a mathematical economist.(Shubik 1992) Then,
maybe, some other author could have focused his attention on the poor
mathematical nature of Riker’s work rather than, as Shubik did, on its gen-
eral structure. As a matter of example, another reviewer could have pointed
out the fact that coalition theory was being tentatively employed to obtain
existence as well as stability results in General Equilibrium Theory.17 But
probably, such criticism would have totally missed the point. Riker aimed
not to offer a sophisticated mathematical theory of political coalitions or to
elucidate their mathematical features. Instead, he wanted to provide new
insights into political processes by modeling rational behavior following the
methodological considerations explained in the first chapter of his work (see
below). Although distant from Riker’s concerns (from a disciplinary point of
view), Shubik understood this perfectly, as his referee report demonstrates.
An issue which, instead, apparently was not caught by Morgenstern.
Thus, whereas Princeton, the place where Game Theory was initially
created and where there was a small but enthusiastic community of game
theorists, rejected Riker’s manuscript, Yale instead accepted it, and The
Theory of Political Coalitions was finally published in 1962.

3 Riker’s The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962)

Riker’s The Theory of Political Coalitions represented the most significant
accomplishment of the author’s intense commitment to game theory and
formal analysis. He published other such general works only in the 1980s,
although his focus shifted from game theory to social choice analysis, political
theory, and American History (see, for example, Riker 1982.) This effort
was an extraordinarily ambitious enterprise that aimed to construct, using
an "existing general theory of coalitions (the theory of n-person games)," a
theory of coalitions useful in studying politics and that rested on exact and
verifiable assumptions. (Riker 1962b, p. vii)
Riker was not a mathematician, and his work is not ("most emphatically
not." ibidem) a book about mathematics. This is apparent to the reader
acquainted with game theory by his discussion concerning some extremely
formal points. Such weaknesses notwithstanding, his attempt deserves much
16
Except for that concerning the inclusion of threat as side-payment. In the published
version of his work, "the threat of reprisal" is still maintained among the various kinds of
side payments in politics. (Riker 1962b, pp. 109–10)
17
A research program in which even Shubik himself was involved in these developments.
Cogliano 2019

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praise. His main thesis is that political actors will create coalitions just as
large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger. This is the notion of
"minimum winning coalitions," namely that winning coalitions will be con-
strained in their size.18 This idea still occupies a central place in the formal
study of political behavior and party formations, although the specificities
of Riker’s inquiry were disputed on theoretical and empirical grounds. (But-
terworth 1971; Riker 1971; K. A. Shepsle 1974; McKelvey and Smith 1975)
In the second half of his book, Riker slightly modified the n-person analysis
of von Neumann and Morgenstern into a set partition of the voting members
to describe the dynamics of coalition formations, that is, the strategy at
the steps before a winning coalition is established. His theoretical ambitions
in this part are even less fulfilled than in the first part, especially because
the point to be addressed was far beyond the author’s technical capabili-
ties. However, one could find some useful insights on the effective working
of political systems even there.
The first chapter of the book, which the author later defined to Shepsle
as "the most important part of the book" (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 15),
was devoted to presenting the assumptions of his model, as well a general
analysis of the role of modeling in political science. In these pages, Riker
defended a positivistic attitude concerning social science through a mixture
of (at least) three arguments: the necessity for the social scientists of focusing
only on phenomena whose size was easy to circumscribe; of providing an
adequate notion of causal determinism; and finally of testing theories against
facts in the real worlds, to enhance their predictive and explanatory power.19
The theory of games fits all three, since, in Riker’s view, it refers to well-
defined events with clear relations among all the variables and entails both
explanation and prediction.
In the same pages, Riker also discussed the two fundamental assumptions
of his model, namely, individual rationality and the zero-sum property. The
latter refers to those situations that entail pure conflict. Von Neumann
showed that for the case of 2-players only, the solution was determined by
the "minimax theorem" (a result corresponding to the Nash Equilibrium for
the same games).20 Zero-sum also enters in the determination of the n-players
coalition game since the value of each coalition, its "characteristic function,"
is determined through a 2PZSG between each coalition and its opposite.
However, not all political situations are of pure opposition. For instance, the
most crucial feature of politics, as stated by James Buchanan and Gordon
Tullock, requires that people are compelled to accept the decisions of the
majorities, even if they are hostile to them. Therefore, it involves the need
to balance between them.21 Nevertheless, Riker defended this assumption
18
The idea of the minimal winning size was not conceived originally by Riker but was
instead developed by Shapley and Shubik. However, Riker employed this notion in a way
different from theirs. He did not compute each player’s value to play a given game (in a
nutshell, Shapley’s original idea) or the power that each member of an assembly entailed.
Instead, the purpose of this notion was to constrain the coalition structure of a game,
explore its equilibrium and stability, and offer a way to test these results.
19
Riker had elaborated upon the first two elements in the philosophical papers written
in the late 1950s, where he, in his words, "squabbled over methodology." (Riker 1957;Riker
1958a)
20
Note that in this situation, the difference between cooperative and non-cooperative
games, vanishes, since it is not possible, according to the zero-sum condition, to form
a coalition. Instead, in the case of 2-person games without opposition of interests, the
solution is the so-called "Nash’s bargaining solution." Nash 2002b
21
James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent was published in

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by noting that the zero-sum condition is present in many political situations,
for instance, elections and voting, where the loser cannot receive what the
winner gains. Besides, he also observed that even non-zero-sum situations
could be perceived by the people involved as pure conflict. Then, he did not
discard this assumption.
The second fundamental assumption of the model was that of individual
rationality. In particular, Riker criticized the "tautological" view adopted by
economists, which purportedly does not describe behavior but only defines
preferences.22 To him, if any idea of rationality is helpful in modeling politi-
cal behavior, one must adopt the "cruder and already somewhat discredited"
idea of maximizing economic or political man. However, he rejected the idea
of the maximization of power since it is difficult to define what power really
meant (as seen in his empirical analysis of Shapley & Shubik’s work. Riker
1959a). He assumed instead that political rationality encompasses the pref-
erence for winning over losing. So then, a rational political man does not act
according to his chance of gaining more power by passing from a coalition
or a party to another (as presumed in the 1959 paper) but instead according
to his chance of becoming a member of a winning coalition. This embodies
the notion of political behavior that rules the nature of political coalitions.
Indeed, in pursuing this aim, each member must face the fact that the value
of the coalition is determined not by size but instead by its ability to remain
winning, as long as it reduces its size to its minimum winning level.
The bulk of Riker’s analysis is centered around the "size principle,"
namely "the fundamental principle concerning the size of coalitions," that
goes as follows: "In n-person zero-sum game, where side-payments are per-
mitted, where players are rational, and where they have perfect informa-
tion, only minimum winning coalitions occur. (Riker 1962b, p. 32 Italics in
the text) A descriptive statement (or "sociological law") is related to this
principle: "In social situations similar to n-person, zero-sum games with
side-payments, participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will
ensure winning and no larger (Riker 1962b, pp. 32–3)
As is apparent from the definition above, this principle requires rational-
ity, side payments, and perfect information. All are standard assumptions in
von Neumann and Morgenstern’s analysis. The role of side payments is that
each player decides to join a coalition over another based on what he is offered
in them. Perfect information instead rules out the role of uncertainty.23 In
Riker’s model, side payments have great importance in his discussion of the
strategical aspects of coalition-building, viz., the dynamical part of his anal-
1962.(Buchanan and Tullock 1962) Riker had written a very favorable review in the same
year, praising their theory. Furthermore, he eventually joined the Public Choice Society
after it was established. (Riker 1962a)
22
In particular, Riker criticized rationality as presented in Luce and Raiffa’s work: to
them, the theoretical issue to be solved does not entail demonstrating that real men want
to maximize money, power, or something else. Instead, it is sufficient to represent the
preferences’ structure properly and, therefore, examine them empirically. Then Riker
summed up their definition of rationality as follows: Given a social situation in which
exist two alternative courses of action leading to different outcomes and assuming that
participants can order these outcomes on a subjective scale of preference, each participant
will choose the alternative leading to the more preferred outcome"(italics in the text.Riker
1962b, pp. 18–9)
23
Both, in game-theoretical analysis, have a technical meaning. In particular, side
payments are related to the notion of "transferable utility" among players. The first
refers to the existence of a common medium that the players can exchange. If this is
linear with the increment of the player’s payoff, then it is said that utility is transferable.

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ysis. Perfect information refers instead to each player knowing what moves
the other players have made. This aspect is essential for what Riker defined
as the "information effect," which, according to him, represented the proper
way to appraise the effects of the size principle in real-world politics. (Riker
1962b, 77 et ss. See below)
As seen, Riker aimed to discuss political coalitions, namely coalitions
involving winners and losers. Then, the framework of his analysis is cooper-
ative and not competitive since it involves coalitions and, therefore, commu-
nication and agreements among players. Unfortunately, as he rightly noted,
no unique solution exists for such games (contrary to the latter type, where
a solution is a Nash Equilibrium). In his view, the cause is that too much
emphasis has been put by game theorists on the properties of coalitions,
like their existence, reasonableness, or fairness, overlooking instead the pos-
sibility of delimiting coalition structures directly. Since among the different
solutions that followed von Neumann and Morgenstern’s, none appeared to
him significantly preferable to the latter, neither in terms of empirical testing
nor generality, Riker based his analysis directly on the original solution con-
cept developed by the creators of game theory. (Neumann and Morgenstern
2007)
The essential idea is that when the number of players is greater than 2
(naming N the set of all players), each coalition that forms in a game, from
the coalition made up of a single-player only to the coalition of the whole set
of players, has a value which is defined by its "Characteristic Function," v(S)
(where S is a set of players, S ⊆ N ).24 This value is the solution of a 2PZSG
between this coalition and its opposite, that is, v(S) = −v(S). Among
the properties of each Characteristic Function (CF), the most intuitive is
perhaps its additivity; that is, the value of each coalition is greater than the
sum of each component. Each coalition splits its value between its members
in the following way: none receives less than he would receive by forming
a coalition alone, and only the value of the coalition can be split, no more
and no less. The vector of the values for each coalition member is called
"imputation." An imputation dominates another if all its components are
greater than the other. Then, the solution of a n-person game is the set
V of all imputations that do not dominate each other (inner stability) and
dominate all the imputations outside the set (external stability).
Riker focused only on those coalitions that are winning, i.e., that are
larger than some size, arbitrarily ruled (for instance, m, where m ≥ 21 ).
In those cases, he tried to show that, other than the stability conditions
entailed in the "stable set" solutions for n-person ZSG, a further principle
was working, that is, the value of each winning coalition, v(S) (its CF)
reduced with the growth of its size. Put differently, a minimum winning
coalition is worth more than a non-minimum winning coalition.25
Riker restated von Neumann and Morgenstern’s original model, in a more
straightforward and less mathematically sophisticated way, to describe in a
statical way the coalitional structure of a political situation modeled as a
n-person game. However, he also interpreted such a structure in terms of
equilibrium and disequilibrium. Each v(S) can assume a range of values,
24
By coalition, in formal terms, it is intended the number of all the possible subsets of
n, also comprising the empty set ∅ and the set of all players. This number equals 2n .
25
As seen, a minimum winning coalition is a coalition that is winning as long as it does
not lose one of its members. For example, under simple majority rule, with two parties, a
party with 51 members is an MWC. If the winning party has 70 members, it is a winning
coalition, but not a minimum winning one.

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which is a function of its size, and the size of the opponent blocking or
losing coalition. Riker’s definition of equilibrium and disequilibrium directly
reflects each agent’s strategy and rational decisions in the coalitions. In
particular, he defined the notion of "equilibrium" in terms of each coalition’s
realizability or not. Then: "[i]f there are some values of v(S) so unnecessarily
disadvantageous for S as a whole that rational players reject S in favor of an
immediately available alternative T , then these values of v(S) will be said
to be in disequilibrium and S will be said to be unrealizable. Conversely,
those values of v(S) which are not disadvantageous in comparison with an
immediately available alternative will be said to be in equilibrium, and S
will be said to be realizable." (Riker 1962b, p. 262 italics in the text)26 He
outlined three different types of winning coalitions:

1. Those whose value decreases monotonically with the growth of their

size;

2. Those that gain by adding new members, at least until a certain point.
After that point, the value decreases;

3. Those whose values are indifferent to their size27

Intuitively, the first states that the value of the coalition decreases with
the growth of its size. The second case relates instead to a coalition that
gains by adding new members, at least until a certain point. Finally, there
are coalitions whose values are indifferent to their size. So then, the puzzle
is the following: if having reached a majority a coalition deems its owns size
disadvantageous and prefers to leave out some members, then this is not an
equilibrium. Riker showed that, in the first type, the only equilibrium, that
is, the only coalition that is realizable is represented by a minimum winning
size. In the same way, in the second case, coalitions are realizable only until
the peaked point is reached. Finally, the only equilibrium size in the third
case is m, the arbitrarily chosen size. (Riker 1962b, 245 et ss.)
Riker was looking to develop a theory that could be used to make predic-
tions and to be tested against the reality of political facts through the formal
structure of his assumptions. As he wrote: "whether or not the just-stated
conclusion is of any scientific value depends on whether or not an analogous
statement about real-world can be verified." (Riker 1962b, p. 47). The "anal-
ogous statement" is the "size principle, which states that in social situations
similar to n-person ZSG, only coalitions no larger than the minimum size
occur.
However, to assess the principle empirically, one has to face the problem
of "perfect information." Assuming that each member of the coalition can
estimate its size subjectively, it could represent a possible getaway inside
the model. But it would be clearly insufficient to fulfill Riker’s positivistic
approach. He recognized the possibility of arranging laboratory experiments
26
Unfortunately, Riker was not sufficiently precise about what the criterion of realiz-
ability refers to. For instance, it could be obvious to interpret it as a sort of "domination"
criterion for each member of the coalition (recall that ’domination’ can be represented as
if, ~
x>~ y , for all x1 , ..., xn , then ~
x dominates ~
y .) However, this analysis is not outlined in
the appropriate formal terms.
27
Again, Riker’s analysis is quite involute. He adopted a notion in von Neumann and
Morgenstern’s TGEB: the range of admissible values for each CF. Then, among these
values, in the space of ’winning coalitions’ CF, he identified three types: those with a
negative slope (type 1), those with a positive slope in part (type 2), and finally, those with
zero slopes.

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to simulate and test different types of games, but also that, lacking a specific
methodology and rules, the results would be partial. Therefore, he looked for
such empirical assessment in American History. In particular, if one could
show that political leaders made strenuous efforts to reduce their oversized
coalition in the direction of a minimum winning one, he could verify the size
principle. (Riker 1962b, p. 54) He picked up three examples from American
History. Often an oversized coalition (for instance, a coalition of the whole
that, since the assumptions regarding CF, is valued nil) was reduced by its
leader through the expulsion of some of his members. This happened in the
case of Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party, which emerged from the frag-
mentation Democratic-Republican Party28 , the only party that remained in
the US after the disappearance of the Federalist Party as a consequence of
the War of 1812.29 These pages make apparent that Riker was adopting an
explicit "instrumentalist" position: "I do not suggest, of course, that these
nineteenth-century statesmen appreciated this principle as a law of rational
behavior. What I do insist, however, is that it describes their behavior, even
though they probably perceived their problems thus:’ With our overwhelm-
ing majority, there are so many and so conflicting interests in the party that
none can be satisfied. As long as two conflicting interests remain in the
party, neither can be satisfied [which, I add, is why a grand coalition is val-
ueless]. For the sake of action for the interest we approve, we shall therefore
decide to satisfy one interest, and if others are offended, they may leave the
coalition."[...] (Riker 1962b, pp. 65–6)
In a similar spirit, he integrated the role of information in his model
by outlining a relationship between the level of information of each player
in a coalition and the size of the winning coalitions. Namely, the greater
the degree of incompleteness of information, the larger the size of coalitions.
This rule, which Riker named "the information effect," could explain why
MWCs are often not found in the real world. But also why some elections
in US history have been "critical." The American political scientist VO Key
developed the notion of "critical election" to define those elections where the
voters’ involvement is high and new electoral groupings are created. (Riker
1962b, 90 et ss.) But, Riker stated, one could interpret this notion as a period
where the amount of information in the system declined and the uncertainty
grew about the size of the winning coalition.
Riker also elaborated upon some statements from Anthony Downs’ eco-
nomic analysis of democracy. According to the latter, in a 2-parties model,
where voters want to maximize their utility and parties want to maximize
their share of votes, it could be convenient for both parties to be as am-
biguous as possible. However, this would contradict the assumptions about
voters’ utility maximization because this makes it more difficult to vote ra-
tionally for each citizen, thereby encouraging voters to make their decision
on some different basis from issues (viz, the candidates’ personality). This
paradox represented a blow to any attempt to use rationality to define vot-
ers’ and parties’ behavior. However, Riker was convinced that his model
offered a getaway from this situation. If parties seek to maximize the share
of votes only up to the size needed to become a minimum winning coalition,
28
Which he labeled only "Republican Party"
29
The other two examples from American History are: the rise of the Republican Party
as a consequence of the destruction of the Whig Party in the 1850s and the fragmentation
of the Democratic Party in different Blocking Coalitions; the end of the Reconstruction,
when the Republican Party, again a grand coalition’ de-facto divided in different coalitions,
at state and local levels. (Riker 1962b, pp. 59–65)

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therefore, it is not any more convenient for them to becloud their positions
in any situation, but only about those issues that are of concern to voters
about whom they have imperfect information. So the principle that parties
and voters are rational (i.e., utility maximizers) is preserved.
The "size principle" represented an ideal standard to which any reason-
able attempt to form a coalition should conform. In this sense, although
resting on von Neumann and Morgenstern’s solution for n-persons games,
it was not a solution for such games but a "sociological principle." In the
second part of his work, Riker investigated how political leaders set forth
coalition-building and reached a stable arrangement if any. This analysis
aimed to fully exploit what the author later recalled as the main feature of
game theory, namely the choice of strategies. (Riker 1992)
In a nutshell, Riker discussed how coalitions are formed, maintain their
structure, or add new members across a multi-stage game whose last stage
represents the outcome of the process. For example, in voting, where a
weighted majority is required, different coalitions are present (or "proto-
coalitions" in Riker’s terminology). Then, the leader of each proto-coalition
tries to add new members, if necessary, by offering side payments. If, in the
final stage, the coalition structure is such that a minimum winning coalition
occurs, then this represents an equilibrium outcome.
Riker outlined his model as follows: assume a decision-making body,
I, made up of n-members (i.e., a n-PZSG with side payments). In this
body, there are different roles, but each member can assume any role. Each
member’s power (i.e., the weight) is assumed to vary. The decision rule is
that a coalition with weight m, where m is greater than half the sum of the
weight of each player, can act as a whole. The ZSC imposes a limit; no
decision can be taken, so losers would prefer to resign from the body rather
than acquiesce. In this model, coalition building begins when a leader that
is a member of the decision-making body undertakes the task of forming
a coalition on a particular issue. To this aim, the leader needs to attract
followers among the other participants of the decision-making body. Given
the focus on the dynamic process, Riker distinguished between coalitions and
"proto-coalitions." In brief, the first are end products of coalition-building
and can be "winning," "losing," or "blocking." Followers join instead in a
"proto-coalition," a subset of I when this has at least three subsets, and none
has weight m. These proto-coalitions change their size due to moves made
by each member of I, and each move has the effect of changing the body’s
internal structure. Thus, in the first stage of such a game, there are n-single
member coalitions. In the second stage, there are n−1-single-member proto-
coalitions, one 2-members proto-coalition, and so on, up to the last stage,
where either a winning coalition or different blocking coalitions exist.
Since any attempts to build a coalition generate opposition, the effect of
the leader’s first step toward building a proto-coalition is that others follow
him and try to build their coalitions. The growth of proto-coalitions depends
on the leaders’ ability to attract followers by offering side payments. (Riker
1962b, 122 et ss.) These side payments can vary, but Riker listed some
examples. These are payments in promises on particular policies, or subse-
quent decisions, up to the threat of reprisal. Besides, these side payments
also have costs, which the coalition leader pays, and must consider. (Riker
1962b, pp. 109–20) Most importantly, Riker assumed that side payments
were scarce and finite, subject to considerations regarding their economic
value.

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 The study of dynamic coalition building is important because it involves
strategic considerations about the behavior of political actors and the equilib-
rium outcomes and, therefore, their inner stability. To discuss these features,
Riker introduced a notion "in some respect stronger, and in some weaker"
than von Neumann and Morgenstern’s set-valued solution because the latter
did not specify if some coalition in the V -set was winning. He proposed the
notion of a "uniquely preferable winning coalition," which involves the spec-
ification of a determined winning coalition. A uniquely preferable winning
coalition is a coalition that has a greater value than any other one possible
and in which all the participants can satisfy their initial expectations. An
"initial expectation" for a proto-coalition equals the best it can do in joining
alternative non-minimal winning coalitions.
From these considerations, any proto-coalition has some advantages (and
disadvantages) in different stages of the game. An equilibrium solution is
that when a "uniquely preferred winning coalition" occurs, none of the other
proto-coalitions can neither join it or form a new winning coalition. Since this
entails the "Size Principle," then an equilibrium corresponds to the presence
of a Minimum winning coalition.
However, the most crucial problem with this kind of analysis is that the
equilibrium in coalition-building cannot be maintained (i.e., it is not stable),
but it seems to depend on the size and the relative strength of the minimum
winning coalition. (Riker 1962b, 147 et ss.) The effects of this lacking
of equilibrium for political analysis could be very serious: "equilibrium in
society is a kind of stability despite the change. And to say that this model
lacks equilibrium is to say that the social processes it purports to describe
are so unstable- that the political society itself is in fact unstable." (Riker
1962b, pp. 147–8) Therefore, the last three chapters of TPC contained a
purely verbal discussion about the components of this disequilibrium and its
consequences.
Once more, Riker rested on History to assess this theory. In particular,
the event he tried to explain was the so-called "corrupt bargain of 1825,"
when Andrew Jackson won a majority in the electoral college but lost the
vote at the House in favor of John Quincy Adams, who became the sixth
President of the United States. (Riker 1962b, pp. 149–59)
Suppose this event is analyzed in terms of the dynamics of coalition
building. In that case, one can assume that the four presidential candidates
were leaders of four different "proto-coalition": Jackson, Adams, William H.
Crawford, and Henry Clay (who entered the election, but since there was
a maximum of three candidates for a vote in the House, he was forced to
transfer his votes.) The values of the proto-coalitions were the following:
w(P ) = 11 (Jackson), w(Q) = 7 (Adams), w(R) = 3 (Crawford) and fi-
nally w(S) = 3 (Clay)30 . Since Clay, Adams, and Crawford were hostile to
Jackson, the latter’s proto-coalition was "strategically weak," whereas they
Q, R, S formed a "uniquely preferred winning coalition." Jackson’s coalition
shrinks, whereas Adams’ now became the preferred one. The new values
were: Adams with 9 states, Jackson with 7, Crawford and Clay with 4 each.
To obtain a majority, Adams could ally with Crawford or Clay, but not
with both, to maintain an MWC. Eventually, an alliance between Clay and
Adams occurred and was the dominant strategy from the latter’s point of
30
The value of each coalition corresponds to the number of states where each candidate
had the majority. In the House, each state had one vote, which was decided by a plurality
of its representatives

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view. Indeed, if Clay allied with Jackson (despite their ideological differ-
ences), Crawford would have allied with Adams, forming an MWC. If Clay
joined Crawford, now they had the same values as Jackson. Jackson and
Clay-Crawford would have won the election, but the total value would have
been split three ways over two. Given these strategic possibilities, Clay
joined Adams, a majority was reached, and Adams was elected as the sixth
president of the United States. Clay became his Secretary of State.
Then, the historical argument again serves Riker to show the explaining
power of his model and provide the basis for a new understanding of historical
and contemporary political facts. Again, furthermore, Riker stressed the fact
that his example did not show that Adams, Clay, or Jackson were employing
game theory or rational choice, but that their behavior can be explained as
if they did.

4 Political Science and economic modeling: Riker’s

unsolvable dilemma?
Riker’s work was reviewed in the American Political Science Review and
other social sciences journals (Fagen 1963; Matthews 1963; Hotz 1963; Ka-
plan 1963; Flanigan 1965). All the reviewers highlighted Riker’s methodolog-
ical originality and the importance of his non-trivial generalizations about
politics (although with some reservations about the notion of rationality).
Yet, none stressed its formal features. Indeed, none of the reviewers was
a real expert in game theory. As to economics, the book went completely
unnoticed in economic journals.
As Riker lamented in Shepsle’s interview, not many people had a sense of
his work’s theoretical features. (Riker and K. Shepsle 1979, p. 24) Political
scientists indeed focused only on some aspects of his model, especially the
last three verbal chapters. Furthermore, as it is apparent from many re-
views, Riker’s idea came to be framed and discussed mainly in international
politics. Riker’s last chapter, where he tried to detect some considerations
about the developing rivalry between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., caught the read-
ers’ attention more than the formal characteristics of the model. Besides,
Riker’s adoption of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s solution went mainly
unnoticed by game theorists. Consequently, the importance of Riker’s work
on political coalitions rests upon its being the first attempt to elaborate a
model of political behavior explicitly based on a game-theoretical approach,
even if this was far from reaching the levels of contemporary formal analy-
ses in economics. Although Riker’s work did not offer anything new to the
development of game theory, it still represented, in the light of what formal
political theory became from the 1960s onwards, the first step of one of the
most successful translations of theoretical ideas from one domain to another.
A further episode can make apparent how economists and political scien-
tists remained disjointed communities in those years. In a review of a com-
prehensive collection of essays about the different approaches to the study
of politics, Riker complained about the lack of an economic approach (Riker
1959b). We believe that this complaint can be paralleled with the publi-
cation of a strictly formalized volume about the use of mathematics in the
social sciences, with several highly mathematical essays about economics,
management, and psychology, but no reference to political science (Kenneth
J. Arrow, Samuel, and Suppes 1959). Unsurprisingly this volume went un-

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noticed in political science journals. Indeed, only one reviewer (the future
Nobelist Reinhard Selten) noticed, in Econometrica, the absence of an essay
on political science. (Selten 1962)
His theoretical shortcomings notwithstanding, The Theory of Political
Coalitions, alongside other works, like that of Buchanan & Tullock (Buchanan
and Tullock 1962), Anthony Downs (Downs 1957), or Duncan Black (Black
1958) has marked the birth of a formal political theory. (Ordeshook 1986;
Persson and Tabellini 2002) Besides, among these authors, Riker was the
only one who used game theory extensively and, overall, to be a political
scientist with a definite theoretical agenda.
In the remnant part of this section, we discuss Riker’s use of economic
theory concerning his agenda of transforming political theory and the de-
velopment of postwar mathematical economics. In particular, Riker showed
a sheer interest in some methodological issues, which can be confirmed by
his two philosophical papers, the first chapter of his work on political coali-
tions, and other works we will briefly address. (Riker 1957; Riker 1958a;
Riker 1962b; Riker 1977) In the meanwhile, however, he did not adopt deep
methodological arguments. So, the main feature of his philosophy of sci-
ence is represented by the robust faith in the idea of science as a positive
discipline. In order to be a "genuine science," a theory must display those
elements that make it possible to explain the phenomena and predict their
outcomes, eventually by discovering laws that relate different pieces of re-
ality under a single theory. Riker’s approach is "nomological-deductive."
However, he paralleled such a view with a position entailing a more instru-
mentalist approach. Here lies what can be defined as "Riker’s dilemma." He
advocated the development of positive political science, resting heavily on
formal assumptions, but the tools and the kind of analyses he was trying to
adopt were far from being able to fulfill his aspirations.
Following E. Roy Weintraub’s pivotal studies, historians of economics
have interpreted the development of economics as a mathematical discipline
in relation to the parallel development of mathematics as a formalist pro-
gram. In this sense, postwar mathematical economics was not limited to
employing math but mirrored the changes that occurred in this discipline,
that is, "the changed standards for accepting proofs, changed ideas about
rigor, and changed ideas about the nature of the mathematical enterprise."
(Weintraub 2002, p. 2) Similarly, Giocoli summed up the radical transforma-
tions in economics between the 1930s and the 1950s as two distinct visions
of economics. (Giocoli 2003b) The first is the idea of economics as a "system
of forces," which entails the idea that its main subject is the analysis of the
processes generated by market and non-market forces, including - but not
exclusively - the processes leading the system to an equilibrium. Economists
paralleled this idea and replaced it with economics as a "system of relations.
According to the latter, "economics is a discipline whose main subject is the
investigation of the existence and properties of economic equilibria in terms
of the validation and mutual consistency of given formal conditions, but that
has little if anything to say about the meaningfulness of these equilibria for
the analysis of real economic systems." (Giocoli 2009, p. 24)
Such a transformation was far from being accepted without resistance
among economists and gave new fuel to the everlasting debates concerning
the philosophy and methodology of economics.In particular, the spirit of
new axiomatic economics challenged the most traditional views of the sci-
entific enterprise as an explanation and, to a certain extent, a prediction of

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phenomena. For instance, it is pretty obvious that a mathematical model
such as the "General Economic Equilibrium" model lacks both explanatory
and predictive power. Indeed, it is explanatory only in the sense that a
mathematical theorem explains something, and it is predictive in the same
way.Then, as Pierluigi Barrotta rightly put it, Gerard Debreu’s statement,
at the very beginning of his The Theory of Value, according to which his the-
ory explains how the prices are determined from agents’ private ownership
through markets and their role in an optimal state of an economy, could be
seen as meaningless if one assumes that to explain something one has to find
general laws relating different phenomena and their appearance.(Barrotta
and Raffaelli 1998, p. 46; Debreu 1959) This does not mean that economists
are no longer trying to explain phenomena or advance their predictions about
possible outcomes, but new languages and practices have been developed to
fulfill this aim.
For the case of economics, Milton Friedman presented a strictly positivis-
tic view contending, among the others, the development of the discipline as
pure mathematical modeling. Friedman’s view is famous for advocating a
radical instrumentalist approach and his seemingly unique belief that the
realism of assumptions of theories does not matter.31 Still recognizing the
extremely important place of "purely formal or tautological analyses" like
those blazing the trail to the Postwar mathematical economics, given the ex-
treme difficulty of testing substantive economic theories, Friedman, however,
held that "economic theory must be more than a structure of tautologies if it
is to be able to predict and not merely describe the consequences of action; if
it is to be something different from disguised mathematics." (Friedman 1954,
pp. 11–2) Since the most important feature of a theory is to predict some-
thing, mathematical modeling is not sufficient, and realism is not essential
at all.
That Riker was seemingly close to such an idea of economics is apparent
by how he defined the discipline in his work on political coalitions. To his
readers, indeed, most likely political scientists, he defined economics as a
"coherent theory and verified generalizations," the product of "150 years of
empirical investigation and refinement of theory." (Riker 1962b, p. 6)Fur-
thermore, even his treatment of rationality and the attempts to assess his
model empirically show an ostensibly "instrumentalist" influence. (Riker
1962b)32
Starting with rationality, it is well-known that this notion went in the
Postwar years under a dramatic transformation in a mathematical sense.
Game theorist and philosopher Ken Binmore defined this as the "consis-
tency view" of rationality. (Binmore 2015) In a nutshell, the core of this
idea is that rationality does not describe behavior but only defines prefer-
ences in a purely tautological way, and the properties of the utility functions
assume great importance in modeling individual rational behavior. However,
Riker criticized this view, as represented by Duncan Luce & Howard Raiffa
in their pivotal textbook Games and Decisions. (Luce and Raiffa 1957)33
31
"Instrumentalists claim that theories are best viewed as nothing more than instru-
ments." (Caldwell 1994, p. 178) In this sense, such an approach is contrasted with realism,
whereas the latter claims that theories should make real references. Note that Friedman
did not explicitly characterize his position as "instrumentalist." Lawrence Boland did it.
32
Riker did not explicitly refer to Friedman in his work on political coalitions. But he
did in the textbook he wrote about the "Positive Political Theory that he wrote with Peter
C. Ordeshook (Riker and Ordeshook 1973, p. 30), where this position is made explicit.
33
Note, however, that Luce and Raiffa’s work was by far less mathematical than the

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In his eyes, if rationality is to help model political behavior, a simple math-
ematical tautology is not sufficient. On the contrary, as seen, one must
adopt the more meaningful idea of a maximizing economic or political man.
As a consequence, the problem of rational action and empirical validation
should become: "how can the rationality condition be stated in such a way
that it is more than a tautology but not subject to the criticisms implied
in those experiments which show that the scale of individual utility is not
the same as a scale of money." (Riker 1962b, p. 20) And the proper defini-
tion of rationality simply is: "Given social situations within certain kinds of
decision-making institutions (of which parlor games, the market, elections,
and warfare are notable examples) and in which exist two alternative courses
of action with differing outcomes in money or power or success, some par-
ticipants will choose the alternative leading to the larger payoff. Such choice
is rational behavior and it will be accepted as definitive while the behavior of
participants who do not so choose will not necessarily be so accepted." (Riker
1962b, p. 23. Italics in the text). Furthermore, Riker also stated that not all
behavior needs to be rational, but rational behavior is crucial for managing
any economic or political institution. Thus, like the markets are controlled
by those economic agents who adopt a maximizing behavior, the same holds
for the working of political institutions that "select and reward with suc-
cess behavior which is apparently motivated by the intention to maximize
power." (Riker 1962b, p. 21)
One can find even more strong references to a sort of instrumentalist
position in the pages where Riker attempted to assess his "size principle"
historically. (Riker 1962b, pp. 65–6, 149–59. Then, as seen above, what
matters to him is not that politicians closely employ game theory but that
the model offers an accurate explanation of their behavior, thereby making
possible a fuller understanding of it.
Further details, although not developed systematically, concerning the
nature and the scope he attributed to social sciences can be found in a
review essay significantly titled The Future of a Science of Politics. (Riker
1977) Riker again rejected the particularistic study of political events, proper
of the more traditional approaches of political studies, emphasizing instead a
"positivistic view of science" whose central tenets are sets of scientific laws,
i.e., "well-verified generalizations." Besides, by scientific laws, Riker defined
not only those discovered by observation but also theorems derived from
axioms. He seemingly attributed the same scientific status and explanatory
power to both: "Law and axioms thus reinforce each other. The necessity of
the inference makes the law seem reasonable, and the empirical validity of
the law makes the axioms seem true. Thus, with a theory there is a much
stronger reason than mere observation to accept a scientific law." (Riker
1977, p. 15)
Riker’s model for political theory is now explicitly Price Theory, that
"satisfies, in structure and outcome, [his] notion of what a science is just as
well as, perhaps, physics." (p. 22) This theory, he argues, states that price is
determined by equalizing supply and demand in a competitive market. The
law of demand can be derived by an empirical validation of how the quantity
demanded varies when the prices rise or fall. This empirical validation can
be extended to axiomatic theory, developing the theory of consumer choice.
vast part of contributions to Rational Choice Theory. Furthermore, still presenting the
axiomatic idea of rationality, following especially von Neumann & Morgenstern’s treatment
of "expected utility," they were also concerned with the attempts to assess it empirically.

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Despite the supply side of the price theory being less satisfying and intuitive
from the empirical point of view than the demand side, economists gener-
alized both demand and supply into a theory of competitive equilibrium.
In Riker’s words, Price Theory: "contains all the elements in our previous
description of a science. It starts with an empirical law, which is presumably
universal when properly restricted. This law is then imbedded [sic] in a the-
ory of choice. In turn, this initial theory is elegantly elaborated to produce
a nonobvious and far from trivial inference about market clearing, which is
in turn strongly supported by empirical evidence." (Riker 1977, pp. 21–2)
If in this work, Riker’s position shows a "nomological-deductive" ap-
proach, assuming the importance, for the science, of discovering general laws
in order to explain phenomena, in another paper, he returned to the issue of
predictability. (Riker 1980) There, he explicitly stated that economics is a
theory that admits predictions of an equilibrium. Furthermore, its prestige
among other social sciences is due to the "actual occurrence of numerous
predicted equilibria." (Riker 1980, p. 434) Note that Riker generally refers
to economic theory and not to a part of it (like, say, game theory).
However, his close identification between equilibrium and predictions
raises several problems for political theory. Riker linked the main advan-
tage of equilibrium analysis to its ruling out interpretive and psychological
motives behind people’s actions. As he wrote about one of the most impor-
tant results of the theory of voting: "ideological extremists who vote eagerly
for the party closest to themselves certainly intend to bring about extreme
results; yet one social consequence, as McKelvey (1975) has elegantly shown,
is that they drive parties to converge at the ideological center. No amount of
sympathetic interpretation of individuals’ motives and actions can explain
this unanticipated social result. [...] Even when individuals accomplish ex-
actly what they intend, social outcomes are not explained by interpreting
motives." (Riker 1977, p. 28) The failure to produce general results concern-
ing the theory of voting (the most significant example in economics of such a
general result being the General Economic Equilibrium), and, consequently,
the flowering of many "impossibility results" (see especially those discovered
by Richard McKelvey and Norman Schofield) scattered Riker’s faith in his
positivistic idea of science linking equilibrium, individual rationality and pre-
dictions so that he famously argued that not economics but "politics is the
dismal science because we have learned from it that there are no fundamental
equilibria to predict. In the absence of such equilibria, we cannot know much
about the future at all, whether it is likely to be palatable or unpalatable,
and in that sense our future is subject to the tricks and accidents of the way
in which questions are posed and alternatives are offered and eliminated."
(Riker 1980, p. 443)
Therefore Riker, although not rejecting his positivistic program in toto,
spent the remnant part of his career (he died in 1993) investigating further
the institutional arrangements surrounding the persistence of disequilibrium
and the occurrence of many, very fragile, temporary equilibria in choice set-
tings.
Not surprisingly, Riker’s strong arguments concerning the dismal charac-
ter of political science called for a reply in the community of formal political
scientists. Peter Ordeshook did one, and his response makes apparent the
gap between Riker’s view and that of other advocates of formal modeling
more in touch with economic analysis.34 Ordeshook claimed that Riker at-
34
Ordeshook was among the first students to enroll in the Ph.D. Program in Rochester,

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tributed too much significance to the idea of equilibrium as stability and,
therefore, to the idea that price theory itself referred to market stability.
As it turned out, "the presumed stability of markets is an abstract fiction
that most economists recognize as a a theoretical impossibility." (Ordeshook
1980, p. 447 Italics in the text). It was something existing in the formal
model but not necessarily in reality. The same holds for the theory’s pre-
dictive power: abstract descriptions of markets might predict how a change
in the general settings of the model affected prices and consumption but
could not anticipate these changes. For instance, in a market with one seller
and two buyers, the value of the coalition of buyers is zero. The core (i.e.,
the set of all undominated imputations) comprises only those imputations
that attribute value to the seller and nothing to the buyers. Namely, the
single seller is a monopolist and will extract all the added value from any
exchange. Nonetheless, it could be reasonable to assume that buyers could
form a cartel and negotiate as a team, and a new equilibrium would arise.
For example, this now becomes a bargaining problem, where the monopo-
list tries to obtain a distribution as advantageous as possible on the Pareto
frontier. However, the core now consists of all the points in the Pareto fron-
tier, and therefore, the existence of equilibria is not a sufficient condition for
predicting outcomes. (Ordeshook 1980, p. 448)
Ordeshook’s central point is thus that equilibria are elements of the for-
mal model and therefore display features like existence, uniqueness, and
stability but do not necessarily entail predictive power. This argument does
not exhaust the question of the impossibility of collective choices but instead
points to new ways of analyzing the problem. In particular, he called for po-
litical scientists’ genuine contribution to developing new formal models and
not only to employ notions and ideas taken away from economics.
Looking at the differences between Riker’s argument and Ordeshook’s
allows a final appraisal of how Riker used game theory and economic the-
ory and how this differed from postwar neoclassical economics and other
attempts to extend economic reasoning across domains different from eco-
nomics. Returning to Giocoli’s distinction between "economics as a system
of forces" and "economics as a system of relations," Riker’s analysis looks
closer to the former vision. Indeed, to him, equilibrium is not an analytical
framework within which formal analysis can be conducted (and neither the
solution of a game) but instead a relationship of forces. Take, for instance,
how, in his work on political coalitions, Riker defined this notion: "[T]he
notion of equilibrium is that of a relationship of forces arranged so that the
deviation from some point of balance results in a (possibly automatic) cor-
rection back to balance." (Riker 1962b, p. 147) Only in this way equilibrium
can be related to prediction. Besides, this can also explain why he was so
concerned with the issue of disequilibrium. Indeed, in a "system of forces"
framework, disequilibrium and equilibrium have the same importance. Since
it is clear that reality, especially social reality, hardly shows anything similar
to "physical" equilibrium, disequilibrium sometimes has a stronger appeal to
the researcher. On the contrary, in a purely axiomatic model and within the
notion of equilibrium widely employed in game theory (that is, Nash Equi-
librium), equilibrium is simply the necessary outcome of the model, i.e., the
established by Riker in the 1960s and focused on formal theory and game theory. Or-
deshook had co-authored, with Riker, the first textbook devoted to Positive Political The-
ory, in 1973, besides having offered pivotal contributions to voting theory and political
game theory. (Riker and Ordeshook 1973.)

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solution of a problem modeled like a mathematical problem. Naturally, then,
the main issue in such models is the existence or non-existence of equilibrium
itself (and, possibly, its multiplicity).
The point is that in economics, game theory was conceived within the
"system of relations" framework. This simple historical fact shows how the
entry of game theory into political science differed substantially from the
way it entered economics. It also makes it apparent how the task Riker tried
to accomplish, especially in his analysis of political coalitions, was arduous
to achieve: not only because Riker lacked the advanced game-theoretic skills
that could have made his research more mathematically robust, but also
because he considered game theory from a viewpoint that was too different
from his actual development in mathematics and, later, in economics.
Finally, some hypotheses can be advanced for explaining Riker’s resting
on the old idea of "economics as a system of forces." Riker was an outsider
among the community of game theorists and economists as well, so the most
immediate hypothesis is that he simply lacked adequate knowledge of eco-
nomics to fully assess its most recent developments. True as it could be,
such an explanation is not sufficient. A suitable answer lies, in our view, in
the fact that Riker was trying to make sense of the idea of political theory
based on rational choice for political scientists, an audience much different
from economists. In this sense, one could explain, for instance, his rejection
of a preferences-based tautological argument regarding rationality. (Riker
1962b)
He preferred a more meaningful definition over a purely mathematical
approach because the earlier’s meaning could be easily grasped by an audi-
ence not comfortable with mathematical sophistication. But this raises, as
seen, the problem of the wedge between what the theory can do and Riker’s
positivistic aspirations. Then, the refusal of the preference-based approach
pushed him toward a significantly weaker argument to defend rational choice,
namely that, even if not all agents are rational, the most important agents
are (a summation argument). In doing so, the author seems to discard what
the rationality assumption in economics is, viz., one way to constrain the
beliefs and desires people are allowed to have in order to make their ac-
tions explainable. However, he did not offer a valid alternative to explain
individuals’ actions and properly model them. Indeed, restraining the set
of individuals assumed to be rational does not preclude the fact that mod-
eling rational behavior requires strong assumptions about people’s beliefs,
preferences, and formal structure.35
Compare Riker’s idea with von Neumann’s theory characterizing rational
behavior with prudence. Indeed, in his 1928 paper and his 1944 work, ratio-
nal behavior is represented by the "security payoff" given by the minimax
strategy. Namely, a player does not need to know what his opponent’s plan
will be in reality, but if he plays the minimax strategy, he will maximize his
expected payoff in the worst possible case. (Neumann 1928; Giocoli 2003a)
This idea solves the paradox of perfect knowledge discussed in the 1930s by
authors like Morgenstern and Friedrich von Hayek, albeit in different forms.
(Morgenstern 1976; Hayek 1937. See also: Giocoli 2003b) Like von Neu-
35
Besides, Riker implicitly adopted a preference-based idea of rationality when using the
V solution of von Neumann and Morgenstern. Indeed the fundamental properties in the
notion of "imputation" on which the two authors built upon their V -solution and Riker
extensively discussed (although not in mathematical terms), encapsulated the notion of
individual and collective rationality in preference terms. (Luce and Raiffa 1957, pp. 192–3)

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mann, Riker focuses only on one feature of human behavior: the preference
for winning outcomes. Avoiding a too narrow idea of rationality (i.e., that
"individuals’ scales of utility [...] are isomorphic with the scale of some objec-
tive measure such as money or even power"), he expected that "rationality
as winning" could establish the foundation of a theory of political coalitions
based on von Neumann and Morgenstern’s formal analysis. If one interprets
Riker’s argument that way, it could be possible to understand why he chose
it. Nevertheless, there is no contradiction between a formal argument and
an idea of rationality that encapsulates concrete human behavior features.
Von Neumann’s solution was criticized for equalizing rationality and pru-
dence. However, it was not this aspect that undermined its acceptance, but
the mathematical difficulty in proving a similar result for those situations
(non-cooperative and cooperative) different from 2PZSG (a problem that
the newborn idea of Nash Equilibrium overcame).
To conclude, one could explain Riker as resting on an old idea of eco-
nomic analysis as a "system of forces" that, attractive as it might be, was
increasingly being displaced in the very area of economic analysis that he
had selected as his theoretical reference (i.e., game theory) by new ideas
concerning axiomatization through a view of economics as a ’system of re-
lations.’ An area, it should be added, that until very recently has always
been the most distant from the possibility of empirical validation. This, in
a nutshell, was Riker’s unsolvable dilemma.

Conclusion
This paper showed how game theory entered Political Science and what was
the role of William H. Riker.
I focused on how Riker’s analysis differed from economics and formal
game theory, primarily for what concerns the structure of the argument
and the different scope pursued. I showed that Riker’s relationship with
economics and game theory was, in a certain sense, fuzzy. He referred to
economics as a role model, but his idea of economic theory was distant
from that of economists at his time. His treatment of rationality lacks the
generality for establishing a full-breadth theory and, indeed, will be discarded
when ’Positive Political Theory’ aligns itself with economics. Besides, he
understood what was missing in game theory but was an outcast in the
community of game theorists.
Riker certainly had a limited influence on the development of game theory
qua theory. Instead, emphasizing the consistency of his theory with the
explanation of real-world (or even historical) political phenomena served
better his task of showing how functional game theory could be in political
analysis. To this aim, more than a mathematical sophistication that few
political scientists were barely able to grasp, he showed how political behavior
was inherently game-theoretical and, therefore how fertile game theory was
for allowing "political science to rise above the level of wisdom literature and
indeed to join economics and psychology in the creation of a genuine science
of human behavior." (Riker 1962b, p. viii)
With the passing of the years, the difference between formal political
science and economic theory narrowed, up to the point that important con-
tributions were also published in economic journals like Econometrica or The
Journal of Economic Theory. This process paralleled and was the effect of
establishing a community of scholars entirely devoted to the formal analysis

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of political issues. At the same time, it opened a new stream of method-
ological issues, namely the attempts to reconcile positive aspirations with
the ambition to develop a genuinely mathematical analysis. (Austen-Smith
1999) In the end, this was Riker’s most significant legacy. Such a story,
which starts with Riker’s creation of the Political Science Graduate program
at Rochester University, is the necessary complement to this paper.

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