Contingency, Politics, and the Nature of Inquiry

Contingent events are probabilistic. Acknowledging that realized contingencies alter observed political outcomes, however, does little to advance the systematic study of politics. This paper suggests that political science should focus on understanding how foreseeable contingencies, rather than truly “exogenous” unforeseeable events, alter political behavior. The most useful tool for understanding the effects of these foreseeable contingencies on political interactions is the formal and informal analysis of strategic behavior in the face of uncertainty through the use of game theory. This paper identifies the limitations of using observed contingent events to understand the role of contingencies in politics. More broadly, it suggests that the proper analysis of anticipatory strategic behavior has implications for the allocation of research resources across many topics of interest to political science. Contingent events are probabilistic. They manifest or do not manifest because of some uncertainty about the future that is unknown or unknowable to human participants. A simple toss of a coin, for example, will produce an observed outcome of “tails” about half of the time. The contingent outcome “tails” following a coin toss is, prior to the toss, a contingency. How should political science incorporate the fact that important political interactions are embedded in situations where outcomes are unknown prior to their occurrence? The problem political scientists face in confronting contingency is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, rarely are we interested in contingent events for their own sake. Whether a political leader survives an assassination attempt is interesting, in most lines of political inquiry, because we believe that who leads matters and not because the continued persistence or death of that particular leader is itself of interest. We as political researchers are therefore interested in the downstream effects of potential and realized contingencies. In contrast, in gambling or operations research, one might care only about the contingent event itself (does the coin come up heads, or how frequently do we need to test a product to ensure that it is of high quality 99.95% of the time?). Political scientists must therefore incorporate contingency as a mediating factor in the political outcomes they study. Second, political actors are strategic. As such, manifestations of contingencies as contingent outcomes are shaped by the choices of political actors and themselves shape the behavior of strategic actors in anticipation of potential contingent events. For example, political leaders in parliamentary systems may call elections now rather than in the future if the economy is doing well and they fear the contingent outcome brought about by the combination of a surprise future economic downturn and retrospective voting behavior. Thus, elections may be more likely to take place during good economic times than bad ones. Similarly, wise leaders