A Comparative Framework For Viewing Bargaining

Political leadership in any society has two inescapable tasks: the calculative function (to identify problems, to assess the options for solution, and to make choices) and the control or coordination function (to assure that multiple actors comply with policy and coordinate their actions when necessary). As Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom explained long ago, in discharging these tasks, leaders must choose from a limited number of basic means: hierarchy or "command" structures, markets (or price mechanisms), voting and preference counting systems, and bargaining.^[4] Each tool provides both a means by which leaders and followers gain information and make choices ("calculation") and a means by which leaders control (or coordinate) subsequent behavior. Every society employs a combination of each tool, and every polity is therefore a "mixed" system; what distinguishes one polity from another is the mix , the issues with respect to which various tools are employed, the levels of the society at which various mixes prevail, and the stability of the mix.^[5]

Looking at the PRC developmentally, in the first decade of reform in the post-Mao era we see that there was a relative decline in the use of hierarchical command (and within many, but not all, hierarchies there was a delegation of authority downward). Within the elite there was more

collective leadership. There was an increase in the use of market mechanisms, but it proceeded only far enough to create opportunities for corruption and other rent-seeking behavior by those in the hierarchy who were best positioned to reap benefits from manipulations of the disjunctures between the administrative hierarchy and the marketplace. There was a limited increase in the use of voting and preference counting systems (particularly in county and below governance and in the use of public opinion surveys). There was a significant increase in the use of bargaining, because the agenda was dominated by complex economic and technical issues, with multiple trade-offs, in the context of a collective leadership and bureaucracies of growing size and technical complexity.

What do we mean by "bargaining" and what are its practical and theoretical consequences? Dahl and Lindblom provide a departure point. "Bargaining is a form of reciprocal control among leaders . ... Leaders bargain because they disagree and expect that further agreement is possible and will be profitable. ... Bargaining commonly means reciprocity among representatives of hierarchies " (emphasis added).^[6] Bargaining, therefore, is a process of reciprocal accommodation among the leaders of territorial and functional hierarchies. Bargaining occurs because these leaders believe that the gains to be made by mutual accommodation exceed those to be made by unilateral action (if that were possible) or by forgoing agreement altogether.

A bargaining perspective does not mean that China is on the road to free enterprise—indeed, bargaining can be one means by which established hierarchies endeavor to prevent the further erosion of their power, a way to avoid the increased use of market forces. Moreover, bargaining does not mean that established hierarchies are being dismantled; on the contrary, bargaining is one reflection of the fact that there are large, competitive bureaucracies and territorial administrations that are absolutely central to the functioning of both the society and the polity. Bargaining does not necessarily result in more coherent policies or more efficient governance. Bargaining is more akin to protracted guerrilla warfare within and between large-scale organizations.

Consequently, bargaining has sown within itself a number of pathologies among which are blocked leadership, minority veto, control by the organized (which in China generally means powerful bureaucracies, to include localities), and an inability to assure that the policy to emerge from one bargaining process is consistent with another, for coherence among policies is difficult to assure. Bargaining is a process characteristic of what Jerry Hough calls bureaucratic (and I would add localist) plural-

ism, though its cultural roots in China run much deeper than just the post-1949 bureaucratic structure.^[7]