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Public Choice 93: 216–219, 1997.

Josep M. Colomer, Game theory and the transition to democracy: The Span-ish model. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995. xii + 134 pages. $ 63.95(cloth).

When General Francisco Franco died in November 1975, Spain’s economywas backward and isolated, its corporatist government a mere gloss on aregime that was a throwback to 1930s fascism. By the early 1980s, barelyhalf a generation later, Spain enjoyed a stable parliamentary democracy andentered the European Community and NATO, thus reintegrating its economyand defense forces with western Europe. That Spain would emerge from fourdecades of dictatorship into democracy was not obvious, and that successmakes one of the most interesting stories in recent western European politics.

Colomer’s book, a revision of a 1990 Spanish version, examines the criticalstages of the democratic transition, using basic game theory in the spirit ofWilliam Riker’s “herethetic analysis”, that is, the study of political behavior byuncovering the specific incentives and constraints facing political actors usinghistorical methods in combination with techniques for analyzing strategicbehavior borrowed from game theory and social choice theory.

King Juan Carlos I, who succeeded Franco as head of state, and AdolfoSuarez, the second post-Franco President, both committed to reform, moder-ation and democracy, play leading roles in this story. Both exhibited courageand political skill in framing a constitutional order including the widest pos-sible range of parties founded with the greatest degree of legal continuity.Achieving this required complex negotiations between factions and partiesfrom both the right and left.

Colomer analyzes five key events: the appointment of Suarez as President,the passage of a basic reform law which abolished the Francoist legislature(Cortes) and enabled parliamentary elections, the passage of a new Constitu-tion, legalization of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and the defeat of the1981 coup d’etat. The political spectrum is divided into three parts, comprisingthose wishing to preserve Francoist institutions (“ultras” and “continuists”),those wishing for reform within existing legal structures (“reformists” and“openists”) and those preferring building political institutions from scratch(“rupturists” and revolutionaries). More simplistically, political actors aredivided among continuists, reformists and rupturists.

The first critical stage of transition involved installing the reformist Suarezas President in July 1976 while using Francoist procedures, requiring theCouncil of the Realm to present the King with three alternatives, and allow-ing the King to choose the President. The Council comprised 15 corpo-ratist representatives from the Church, universities, Army, etc., all chosen

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for loyalty to existing institutions, none popularly elected, and thus predis-posed against reform. Nonetheless, the Chairman of the Council, TorcuatoFernandez-Miranda, managed the bravura “herethetic” feat of arranging acomplicated, multi-stage voting procedure which put Suarez’s name on thelist presented to King Juan Carlos. Colomer describes the details of procedureclearly, and conveys the magnitude of Fernandez-Miranda’s skill at manip-ulating divisions among the continuist Councillors. However, there are gapsin the analysis. For example, Fernandez-Miranda required a simple majorityvote on each of 19 initial candidates separately. Colomer’s table of imputedcandidate rankings for four groups within the Council (Table 3.1) lists twocandidates which dominate Suarez, yet were eliminated in the first round.Either the imputed rankings are incorrect or Councillors voted strategically,contrary to assumption.

Once appointed President, Suarez exhibited considerable political skill,by placating, threatening and cajoling the continuists to his right and therupturists to his left. Suarez’s basic tactic, threatening each end of the politicalspectrum with isolation if it failed to go along with moderate political reform,worked well enough to replace the Francoist Cortes with a (mostly) popularlyelected parliament and to prevent most of the leftist parties from boltingthe reform process. Colomer’s strategic analysis here consists of two-playernormal-form games and orderings for Suarez and either the continuists or theleftist parties.

The analysis illustrates the basic strategies of political transition, althoughthe use of game theory is often less than convincing. First, strategies are“continuity”, “reform” and “rupture”, elsewhere described as outcomes thusleaving the mapping between strategies and outcomes unclear. In any bargain-ing situation understanding the consequences of impasse plays a central role.In Suarez’s negotiations with continuists impasse could plausibly have led tomilitary takeover or merely to delay. The reader is left wondering whetherplaying “rupture” would have been a stalling tactic or an invitation to civilwar, or some probability distribution over those events.

Second, the choice of solution concept is unclear. For example, the nego-tiation between Suarez and the leader of the PCE is modeled as a Prisoners’Dilemma in which Suarez declines to legalize the PCE and the PCE rejectsreform. Nonetheless, Colomer claims each party would “promote conditionalcooperation from the beginning”, and choose the Pareto superior outcome inwhich a legalized PCE accepts reform. Thus the analysis seemingly abandonsdominant strategy equilibrium as a solution concept, and thereby rejects anypredictive power for game theory. The real problem is that both Suarez and thePCE have strategies not included in the game form, each having measures topunish a reneging partner. Formal modeling must incorporate these additionalstrategies, which are presented in the text.

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The final step consolidating democracy was the failure of the February 1981coup d’etat. Disaffected army officers hoped either to coopt or intimidateKing Juan Carlos into accepting a military-led government, as the militaryhad done to the King’s grandfather in 1923. Once the coup began, startingwith an invasion of the legislature, the conspirators found that they hadseriously overestimated their support among the rest of the military andunderestimated the King’s commitment to parliamentary democracy. Colomershows two sets of preferences for the King, one perceived by the conspiratorswhich would have implied acquiescence, the other true preferences whichimplied defiance. This view is troubling, as it suggests that conspirators wereunable to plan rationally and the King could have prevented the coup bymaking his preferences known, as he had the chance to do while meetingan emissary of the conspirators in 1980. A more sophisticated model, basedon standard entry-deterrence models with incomplete information, wouldhave a probability for each possible set of preferences for the King. In thismodel the King benefits from ambiguity concerning his true preferences andconspirators are seen as having taken a gamble which failed, rather than anirrational action.

Colomer provides a clear view of the inner workings of Spain’s democratictransition, but little context for the larger social and historical movementswhich accompanied and supported that transition. The introduction providesa terse summary of Spain’s political history in the 20th century, enough tointroduce the major players in the transition, but not enough to give a non-specialist a basic understanding of Spanish history and society. In particular,a complete explanation of the successes of the 1970s must also explain thefailures of the 1930s which led to the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 anddefeat of Second Republic. In addition, as the memory of Civil War affectedevery actor’s perceptions of the risks of political impasse, some descriptionof the past war and its causes is necessary to understand recent conflicts andbehavior. As the failure of democracy in Spain during the 1930s paralleled theexperience of central and eastern European nations, its success in the 1970sprovides a model for those nations in the 1990s. Those parallels suggest thepresence of deeper structural trends which must be considered alongside theparticular interactions among the chief political actors.

From an even longer perspective, Spain combines a history of constitu-tionalism reaching back into the early 19th century with partisan infightingamong conservatives, Republicans and others with liberal tendencies, andproponents of regional autonomy which upended a string of political struc-tures. The latest constitution, with its culture of political moderation, providesthe best chance so far for the long-term survival of parliamentary democracy.Colomer’s central claim, that this success is the result of the political skill ofa handful of political actors, would be strengthened by an explanation as towhy similarly skillful actors did not emerge 50 or 100 years before.

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The deeper question concerns the use of game theory in political scienceand history. Critical events, by definition, are one-time events and thereforedo not lend themselves to statistical analysis. Political actors do not routinelyadvertise preference orderings, and even determining the full set of strate-gies and outcomes may be difficult or impossible. To expect game theory (orany other theory) to satisfy the usual standards of statistical inference whileexplaining pivotal political decisions is unrealistic. Nonetheless, game theoryhas much to add to traditional methods of historical research, throwing lighton the underlying mechanisms of strategic interactions. In historical appli-cations game theory must pass the same standard as traditional methods. Anexplanation of historical behavior can only be regarded as compelling if itdovetails perfectly with all relevant, verifiable information and with plausi-ble notions of human motives and interests. The demands on new methodsmust be no different: both the historical particulars and formal theory mustbe drawn with unceasing accuracy. The reward for such efforts is an under-standing of history, clearer and deeper than previous ones, gained through aricher model of political action.

Colomer’s attempt to extend Riker’s methods to recent European history isadmirable. His book sheds considerable light on Spain’s democratic transi-tion, but falls short of Riker’s high standard in both the historical and formalmodeling dimensions. The thread of the transition’s story is there, but needsfleshing out through a broader historical perspective and the creative and cor-rect use of game theory.

ANDREW AUSTIN, Economics, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-5882, U.S.A.