The Political Red Queen

In ‘The law of selection in the public economy as compared to the market economy’, Professor Francesco Forte (1982) – contemporary doyen of the Scienza delle finanze tradition – extended an invitation to consider the public economy by means of evolutionary principles of selection. Not many replied to Professor Forte’s invitation. This article is a delayed response to the invitation. Through a parallel with a metaphor from Lewis Carroll, it proposes the Political Red Queen hypothesis: politicians work to stay in power by weakening the evolutionary pressure under which they would otherwise naturally operate. A Political Red Queen exerts effort – runs, in the language of Carroll’s original Red Queen metaphor – to make policy, promulgate laws, supply public and merit goods, and so on with the prime objective to survive by reducing the uncertainty linked to maintaining a political role. A Political Red Queen thus works to weaken ‘natural’ political selection. The Political Red Queen hypothesis is shown to hold, mutatis mutandis, for both democratic and non-democratic political environments. It can be viewed as incorporating a positive public choice nexus between politics-as-exchange and politics-as-power.