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POLITICAL CAPITALRichard D. FrenchPublished online: 11 Jul 2011.

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POLITICAL CAPITAL

Richard D. French

Political capital is a concept used regularly in the media though largely ignored by political theory—the

resource which politicians use to induce compliance from other power holders. This article provides an

account which is responsive to our intuitive grasp of the term, founded upon a concept of represen-

tation as a gap between citizens and politicians, bridged by reciprocal judgments. Political capital is

the by-product of these reciprocal judgments, which has the commodity characteristics of an infor-

mation good.

Introduction

Political capital: demagogues are said to exploit events to ‘make’ it; the hapless, inept orunlucky contrive to waste it; canny legislators husband it by the judicious distribution offavours and the timely rolling of logs; prudent governments hesitate at the prospect of itsloss; the newly elected or politically blessed revel in its plenitude. But just what is it? Whatcan we know about it?

The article views politics as a set of activities and practices to which the existential situ-ation of the elected representative (and of the political appointees, such as American cabinetsecretaries, directly dependent upon them) is central. Manifestly, autocrats can accumulatepolitical capital, but here the focus is upon the practising politician as a crucial agent ofdemocracy.

In the life and practice of politics, political capital is central. The democratic state maypossess a monopoly on the legitimate deployment of coercive force, and various offices ofstate may comport official powers and authorities, but it is remarkable how little thesefactors play in the day-to-day push-and-pull of democratic life. Political capital is constitutedby the store of mostly intangible assets which politicians use to induce compliance fromother power holders, such as leaders in business, labour, the professions, the media andcivil society, and from other specifically political actors, including those in their own politicalmovement, and notably in the case of presidents and prime ministers, from their own closecolleagues and appointees (Neustadt 1990: 30, 40, 150; Heffernan 2003; Schabert 1989: 11–12; Smith 1995). If we are interested in the vicissitudes of a particular career, in the configur-ation of forces in a particular political struggle, in the strength of one specific political party ormovement relative to another, then we must attend to political capital as a key, historicallycontingent factor in outcomes.

Politicians are said to be more or less powerful. When they assume office—not an inevi-table prerequisite for political power, but the paradigm case—they are said to ‘take power’, or

Representation, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2011ISSN 0034-4893 print/1749-4001 online/11/020215–16# 2011 McDougall Trust, London DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2011.581086

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to be ‘in power’. The argument is that political capital is the form that power takes in formalpolitics, that the concept of capital provides insight into this species of power, and that thestatics and dynamics of political capital illuminate some fundamental features of democraticlife.

The second section of this article examines some theoretical arguments surrounding thetransfer from economics to other social sciences of the concept of ‘capital’. The third sectionspecifies the characteristics of political capital. The following three sections examine thethree key determinants of political capital: opinion, policy and political judgment. A shortfinal section outlines some implications of this analysis.

The Metaphor of Capital

The last two decades have seen the widespread adoption of ‘capital’ in a variety of socialscience disciplines, to signify a stock or store of economically unconventional assets used asresources by individuals, collectivities or institutions. We have, most commonly, socialcapital, but also human capital, ecological capital, cultural capital, symbolic capital, moralcapital, media capital, organisational capital, institutional capital, and so on, up to and includ-ing political capital. These metaphorical forms of capital have in common that unlike conven-tional capital, they are not easily monetised, nor alienable, nor uncontroversially subject to theconventions of accounting.

The concept of social capital, the most widely employed, has been the object of strongcritique. Arrow, for example, has argued that the concept of social capital be abandonedbecause social capital does not imply the sacrifice of present for future benefit (2000: 4).This objection would not apply to the concept of political capital to be developed below.

The most persistent and caustic critic of the use and abuse of social capital is Fine (2001,2010), for whom what is conventionally understood as capital is itself ‘social’ in the sense that itis embedded in relations of power and exploitation in capitalist society. ‘Social capital’ is thenan obfuscation of that potentially emancipatory insight. For Fine, capital must be the analyticalcentrepiece of a critical political economy whose task is to ‘challenge the status quo and todirect attention to systematic sources of power corresponding to disadvantage’ (2001: 198).

At this metatheoretical level, there are at least two weaknesses in Fine’s argument. First,he does not give one who does not share his political agenda a strong reason to share hisanalysis. Second, he assumes for the social sciences as a whole a unified conceptual vocabularywhich appears more distant than ever.

One cannot, however, gainsay Fine’s searching examination of what he calls the ‘chaos’of contemporary scholarship employing the term ‘social capital’. He shows that it is often rolledout opportunistically and superficially and just as promptly forgotten. He would presumablyagree with Hacking (1999: 50), for whom, ‘There is no harm in one person stretching a meta-phor, but when many do, they kill it’. At a lower frequency, the same critique can be said tohold for the concept of ‘political capital’. The author’s informal survey of several dozen usesof the term political capital in the scholarly literature, located through Google Scholar,shows it subject to the same erratic employment as social capital.

The predominant usage in the scholarly literature, however, and virtually the only usagein the mass media, is to denote a non-monetary asset used in politics for the private and instru-mental purposes of political agents and organisations. Each form of life and work evolves itsown logic, its own vocabulary and its own style of reasoning. The employment of theconcept of ‘political capital’ to describe politics is not going to go away. The purpose of this

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article is to try to deepen our understanding of political capital in formal politics—to create alarger and better defined target, as the case may be. The article begins from the point wherethe vernacular and the predominant scholarly usage intersect.

Bourdieu has offered the most elaborate account of political capital, as part of his soci-ology of the power relations among social groups. The primary forms of capital are economic,social, cultural and symbolic; they are generally convertible one into another and constitute theassets which permit the reproduction of relations of domination and deception in societieswhich are divided by their differential distribution. Political capital is a form of symbolicpower, ‘credit founded on belief and recognition . . . [it] is the product of subjective acts of rec-ognition . . . a power which those who submit to it give to he who exercises it’ (Bourdieu 1981:14). For Bourdieu, however, representation can only be ‘a sort of embezzlement’, ‘usurpation’,‘double-dealing’ or ‘structural bad faith’, unredeemed by the occasional representative whosesincerity is only exceeded by his or her naivety (1991: 206, 209, 213, 214 –15). Bourdieu’s workis full of stimulating insights, incisive formulations and provocative critique, but his politicalanalysis has a certain mechanical quality which defies the subtlety of his theory, and whichmakes its systematic disenchantment of politics like a story whose end we can see comingfrom far too far away (cf. Lane 2006: 95).

In lieu of the pessimistic certainties of the Bourdieuian political field, this article isfounded upon the more contingent and spontaneous possibilities of a world something likethat evoked by Oakeshott (quoted in Lessnoff 1999: 130):

In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for

shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enter-

prise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship

consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend

of every hostile occasion.

What is Political Capital?

Political capital in a democracy originates in the first instance from representation, in par-ticular from the fundamental antinomy that representatives must be from the people butcannot remain of the people.

This ‘gap’ in representation, this separation between citizens and politician, originates inthe need for the group to create itself politically by its members ‘dispossess[ing] themselves infavor of a spokesperson’ (Bourdieu 1991: 204). Bourdieu (2000: 52–3), Ankersmit (1996: xiv)and Rosanvallon (2006: 91) all insist on the fundamental discontinuity which separates therepresentative from the represented.

This tension is, according to Runciman (2008: 39):

one of the central insights of modern politics, and the steady advance of democracy has done

nothing to diminish its significance: to rule in a modern state is by definition to play a kind of

double role – that of the everyman who is also the only person with real power.*

Is it only the assumption of ‘real power’ which constitutes the gap between citizen and repre-sentative? If the group once creates itself politically by dispossessing itself in favour of a repre-sentative, the act of dispossession means exactly that the representative is then free to defineand redefine the group by speech and action, not always with the interests of the original con-stituency foremost (Ankersmit 2002: 115; Bourdieu 1991, 2005; Latour 2003; Saward 2006; cf.

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Schabert 1989: 45, 51). But it may be possible to identify something more that distinguishes therepresentative from the represented.

Persons engaged in the private sphere—the public implications of what they do not-withstanding—operate against a specifiable and finite professional and moral horizon. Anoccupation carries with it a set of objectives and expectations which may be controversialbut is not in practice inexhaustible. The persona publica, by contrast, offers him- or herself inpursuit of the good of society. This role operates under every eye against an infinite moralhorizon, an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly controversial variety of objectives and valuesagainst which a public person may be judged. One who bears this kind of public responsibilitylives a life no longer framed by considerations commensurable with those framing the lives ofthe citizens they represent, and this is the gap which separates the representative from therepresented for as long as the former represents the latter (cf. Schabert 1989: 219; Strauss1959: 16–17; Thiele 2006: 10–11). It is not normally power which weighs most heavily onthe political shoulders, it is the prospect of its absence.

The prospect of the absence of political power flows from the represented, the consti-tuency, closing the gap or completing the circle of representation. The representative gap isfilled by reciprocal acts of judgment on the parts of the political figure and constituents.The product of these reciprocal acts of judgment is political capital. It is something alongthese lines that Ankersmit (1996: 50, 53–4) means when he says that:

power originates in the decision of the people to allow the body of the people to be divided

into representatives and persons represented . . . Political power is a quasi-natural phenom-

enon that comes into being in the relation between the representative and the person rep-

resented and cannot be claimed by either one of the two parties.

How then can we characterise political capital? It is, first, a phenomenon which inheres in therelations between persons. It is, second, susceptible of comparison rather than measurement(Barry 1991: 298; Young 1991: 132).

Third, political capital is always in short supply. Observers of the American presidencyemphasise that taking positions, sponsoring legislation, and employing the prerogatives ofthe presidency usually reduces the capacity to do so at some later time. Political capital isfinite and uncertainly renewable.

Fourth, as the product of the reciprocal judgments of political actors and citizen-con-stituents, political capital is intangible, volatile and inherently unstable. Bourdieu (1981: 18)calls it ‘supremely labile’. Schabert (1989: 24) says that ‘power is an unsteady companion’.

Political capital has the characteristics of an information good: difficult to appropriate ormonopolise (despite constant attempts to do so); rapidly depreciable; difficult to cost, butoften expensive to create; non-rivalrous in any given application (my consumption, as politicalcapital is applied to induce my compliance, does not reduce yours); non-excludable in appli-cation (I can only with the greatest difficulty prevent your consumption); jointness of supplyoffering large economies of scale (production costs are not directly proportional to thenumber of consumers, i.e., the number of persons from whom compliance may be sought);and pregnant with externalities which are difficult to foresee or to manage.

Political actors seek to maximise political capital. The judgments of policy, politics andpoliticians by citizens shall be called, following Beiner and Nedelsky (2001: ix), ‘civic judgment’.Civic judgment creates opinion, which is a principal determinant of political capital. The invest-ment or application of political capital by a political actor—on other politicians, power holdersin society, citizens at large, from whom compliance is sought—represents a commitment

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which over time, all other things being equal, tends to reduce the stock of capital available tothe political mover in question.

Political capital is non-excludable in a rather special way. Like most information goods,and unlike some paradigmatic public goods, the market for political capital is dependent onthe particular interests of consumers. Citizens who are indifferent to policy and politics,whose demand for policy is negligible, largely exclude themselves from the production andthe destruction of political capital. About 20% of the citizens of the industrial democracieslive within the confines of the fiscal, criminal and traffic laws of their countries, and benefitfrom its public goods, but choose not to take much if any part in political life. They do notescape the ambit of the coercive powers of their state, but neither are they subject orobject of the varying capital of its political actors. On the other hand, those who have ademand for policy, be it ever so general as a preference for right or left, or for certain demo-graphic characteristics in office-holders, or for the civic duty of voting, cannot exclude them-selves from the operation of political capital—that is, from judging political actors and fromoffering support or resistance to their projects. The more intense, direct and continuing thecitizen’s demand for policy, the more intense, direct and continuing his or her role in the cre-ation and destruction of political capital.

Political capital is the resource which political actors deploy to structure the incentives ofother actors in society. A politician’s relative capacity to change incentive structures (cf.Dowding 1991: 48), where there is a demand for policy, is a function of the amount of politicalcapital at his or her command.

The determinants of political capital of a political actor are opinion (aggregated civicjudgment), policy (the sanctions and rewards—substantive policy, penalties, punishments,appointments, patronage—at the disposal, or potentially at the disposal, of the politicalactor) and what shall be called political judgment (the reciprocal of civic judgment, the judg-ment of the politician in the deployment of political capital). Formally, PCt ¼ f i (o↔p)t. Politicalcapital is a function of the interaction of opinion and policy at time t. This function, f i, is a vari-able function which denotes the exercise of political judgment, the discernment and skill of thepolitician in a specific political context.

This equation adjusts from period to period as events and actions modify politicalcapital. For any political actor, assume that the combination of her actions and the relevantpolitical events over, say, the six-month period 1, will determine, say, 80% of her politicalcapital at time t at the beginning of period 2. What will have changed, principally, overperiod 1 is o, opinion about her, her policies (the exercise of p), her party and the state ofthe world as it effects their positioning—the vector sum of constituents’ civic judgments.This adjustment never stops until the politician steps out of public life. It adjusts dynamically,quickly or more slowly depending upon the intensity of political activity in any period.

To recapitulate, political capital consists in part of policies—prerogatives such as voting,nominating, advocating, endorsing, criticising, funding, tabling, which are deployed in politicallife—and in part of opinion—that is, reputation, prestige, popularity or approval enjoyed by apolitician. The two are of course intimately linked. The agents in question compete in exercis-ing political judgment about the accumulation and investment of these resources. They maybe legislators or executives, but they have in common that their stock of political capital deter-mines their relative efficacy.

Much of what matters in the management of political capital eludes a politician’s control(Pierson 2000: 258). The political environment is made of multiple forms and perspectives, asArendt (2000a: 204) described it:

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the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspec-

tives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common

measurement or denominator can ever be devised . . . Being seen and being heard by

others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different

position. This is the meaning of public life.

The task of ‘being seen and heard’ is a unending battle against what Latour (2003: 154) calls the‘the continuous din of the agora, the commotion of the crowd, the difficulty of listening to somany voices’, where ‘making oneself heard and obeyed . . . of being forced to decide in realtime, life-size, scale one, without any assurance of cause and effect’ constitute the ‘particularconstraints of public talk’.

This means that politics is a practice for which neither professional norms, algorithmicmethods nor rational transaction suffice. It is an altogether more contentious, competitive,unpredictable and improvisatory phenomenon (Dunn 2000; Geuss 2008: esp. 15, 97; Geuss2009: 34 –6; Philp 2007; Sabl 2002: 16; Schabert 2009: 30, 147 –50). Politics is a struggleagainst the immanent prospect of insufficient political capital and the absence of power; anunequal struggle moreover, one in which the means of struggle are protean, the contextunpredictable, the rules customary and obscure, and the strategy that of a multi-playergame under incomplete and imperfect information, a game of infinite iterations and noequilibrium.

Opinion

‘Being seen and heard’: the actions and speech of political figures create impressionsamong citizens, who exercise civic judgment to form opinions, which are a critical determinantof political capital, which permits political actors to pursue their policy objectives and to antici-pate re-election.

The need to be seen and heard means that politics is in important measure a series ofperformances (Schabert 2009: 4). Politicians, whether they consciously wish it or not, are attrib-uted a political style, a style of which they may be themselves no more than semiconscious, butwhich serves the citizen as a crucial moment for the assimilation of politics, for civic judgment(Ankersmit 1996: 158; 2002: 150).

The ‘analysis of political style suggests that often political decisions turn on transitoryaesthetic perceptions, that a political system is continually reinvented through perform-ances both scheduled and spontaneous, and that political power is very difficult tograsp’, writes Hariman (1995: 73), ‘power can be a relation created through performance,or a residual property of previous or repeated performances, but it is not likely to bethe same thing as the application of force or the rational operation of administrativepractices’.

The impressions formed by political style are importantly composed of reactions, ofteninarticulable, to non-verbal cues or spontaneous expression ‘given off’ involuntarily by politicalactors (Fenno 1978). Citizens observe politicians with an eye and ear to the facial expression,the telling hesitation, the revealing formulation, the gesture, the timbre of voice and theappearance, as much as to the taking of positions on policy questions (Lanzetta et al. 1985;Pels 2003; Popkin 1991). And non-verbal cues are critical indicators of the veracity, orperhaps more appositely, the authenticity, of the politician (DePaulo et al. 1983; McGraw 1998).

So political style is as much a product of nature and nurture as of reason and will.

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There is a limit to what calculation, self-censorship, scripting and editing (Page 1976)can do for political style in flesh-and-blood. This not the end of the challenges. Politicianshave every reason to distinguish among audiences and try to tailor their performances totheir audience; some publics are far more consequential than others for the formation ofpolitical capital. In the constituency, the representative usually has a good idea as tocertain friends and adversaries, but even there most of the population does not lenditself easily to this kind of categorisation (Fenno 1978: 234; Jacobs and Shapiro 2000: 11;Sidlow 2008: 73).

Outside the constituency, the politician thinks first in terms of proximate audiences—the media, other political actors and those parts of the public likely to be attentive. But theultimate reality for the individual politician is ‘whenever one looks for the court of publicopinion in operation, one will always find particular persons there instead’ (Runciman2008: 139).

So as much as politicians may want to consolidate their base of support, appeal toswing voters, take credit or avoid blame (Weaver 1986; Mayhew 2004), frame or primeissues (Druckman 2001; Druckman and Holmes 2004; Funk 1999), or otherwise make stra-tegic use of opportunities to perform (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000: 3 –26) and thus create pol-itical capital, there are formidable behavioural and informational impediments to beovercome (McGraw 2003).

How do citizens make their half of the reciprocal judgments that go to compose politicalcapital? How do they form opinions of politicians? It is widely understood that most citizensseverely economise on the time and effort they are willing to devote to political matters.Hence they will fail rudimentary tests of civic knowledge. They do however form politicalopinions by a myriad of informal means: the media, conversations with friends, signals fromparty affiliation, social stereotyping, information from employers, professional, union andcivil society organisations, endorsements, and other low-cost, low-deliberation methods. Pol-itical institutions help to shape information useful to citizens (Lupia and McCubbins 2000; Sni-derman 2000). Committed partisans aside, those who have less information will form opinionswhich are less stable, less favourable, more responsive to impressions of character and person-ality than to issue positioning, and more easily affected by the tenor of media coverage thanthose who are more sophisticated.

There is little evidence that political efforts to persuade citizens to change their basicpositions on the issues are very effective; as Jacobs and Shapiro (2000: 51; cf. Bianco 1994:51) observe, politicians ‘rarely count on directly persuading the public of the merits of theirposition by grabbing the public’s attention and by walking it through detailed and complexreasoning’. As an American politician once said, ‘It’s not the issues that can kill you, it’s theway you handle the issues’ (cf. Fenno 1978: 241). So politicians attempt to frame and toprime images and issues in ways which will induce positive responses and may chase issueswhich offer the opportunity of favourable positioning.

What are the typical dynamics of aggregate opinion? Erikson et al. have offered an ambi-tious synthesis of the evolution of presidential approval. While the opinions of some citizenswill vary almost randomly over relatively short periods of time, these fluctuations will cancelone another out in aggregate public opinion. Much opinion is fixed by partisan loyaltiesand when major events move opinion in the aggregate, partisans of different allegiance (inthe case in point, Republicans and Democrats) move in the same direction, albeit from differ-ent levels of approval for any given incumbent. There remains a group of unattached citizenswho pay some attention to politics. A certain portion of the citizenry absorbs political

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information whether its members set out to do so or not. These unattached but informed citi-zens, moving in relatively modest numbers, help cause macropolitical outcomes to change(2002: 432).

Politicians’ obstinate determination to create and preserve political capital, notwith-standing the difficulty of the task, becomes clearer when we observe the underlying momen-tum of entropy which functions inexorably from the moment of electoral victory. Brace andHinckley (1992: 31–44) call it the ‘decay curve’ or the ‘cycle of deflating expectations’ whileLight (1991: 10) calls it the ‘cycle of decreasing influence’ and Mana et al. (1990: 593, 608)refer to the ‘immutable dynamic of erosion’ and ‘inevitable decline’.

Time becomes a major resource and thus a major factor in political calculation. Thenewly elected politician enters office in the aura of victory and public approval, and formost politicians, most of the time, it is all downhill from there. The political honeymoon, oretat de grace, however sweet, is always going to be more or less short. Erikson et al. (2002)show this clearly in respect of the President of the United States by showing the averagemonth-by-month approval ratings for seven presidencies (see Figure 1).

There are a number of theories to explain this phenomenon, but Erikson et al. argue thatthe honeymoon is the product of a media holiday during which journalistic criticism is mutedand citizens are not exposed to negative information about the new incumbent. After the hon-eymoon, presidents make decisions which disappoint members of their winning coalition,voters with unrealistic expectations become disillusioned, the frictional costs of governingtake hold, and media coverage ‘reverts to the more normal range of good and bad’ (2002:35–51).

Any given opinion rating is the product of previous political performances, that is, appli-cations of political capital in preceding periods. It is generally accepted that negative infor-mation has a greater impact than positive information. Erikson et al. show that the effectsof major events on presidential approval have a half-life of less than a year and observethat for economic conditions ‘voters discount the past with an exponential decay’ (2002: 57,244–5). Thus if citizens forget or discount more distant events—those more than severalmonths ago at the longest—then politicians have to believe that it’s never over until it’s

FIGURE 1

Average monthly approval ratings for seven presidents of the United StatesSource: Erikson et al. (2002: 38).

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over, and that building political capital for the next election remains the only rational course ofaction.

Note however that, absent the indulgence of the political gods, the effort to build willmore often be a defensive struggle simply to preserve capital. The arrival of exogenousevents which bless incumbents with a renewed popularity is out of the control of the politi-cal actors themselves, though clearly how they respond makes a great difference to the ulti-mate outcome. Conventional wisdom suggests that Margaret Thatcher and George BushSenior achieved unprecedented political capital from their actions in the wake of entirelyunpredictable aggression by distant autocrats with regional or domestic considerationsprimary in their minds. But this does not mean that the intentional diversion of public atten-tion through foreign adventures is a durably effective recourse for democratic leaders inneed of political capital (Brace and Hinckley 1992: 91–114; Lai and Reiter 2005; Eriksonet al. 2002: 48–57; Mana et al. 1990). The tail, it seems, does not often wag the dog veryhard nor for very long.

Policy

If the opinion variable is the dominant one in the composition of political capital, thenwhat is the role of p, policy? Policy is composed of the rewards and penalties which a politicalactor can use to obtain compliance. Citizens want ‘policy agreement’ from politicians (Eriksonet al. 2002: 31). They are disappointed by measures which seem to counter their preferencesand are gratified by those which appear to fulfil them. But this is no more than the beginning ofthe story.

First, it is clear that neither politicians nor citizens have very certain epistemologicalbases on which to form expectations about most policy, most of the time. To adapt a looseversion of the institutional economics vocabulary: political promises, engagements or under-takings are incomplete, non-transparent contracts, executed in a noisy field, under conditionsof severe asymmetry of information, and enforceable mostly by the crude and lumpy (all ornothing) mechanisms of democratic politics (Young 1991: 133). Uncertainty, principal-agentproblems, moral hazard and shirking are endemic. According to Kuklinski and Quirk (2000:154, 168), civic judgment is exposed to the manipulation of politicians and the latter’s assess-ments of public preferences are equally fragile. An ‘electoral mandate’ is the rarest of phenom-ena (Grossback et al. 2005; Shamir et al. 2008).

Second, it is by no means clear that citizens are in a position to demand accountabilityafter the fact from their representatives. Politics and policy constitute a world of unintendedconsequences. Besides, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000: 21) note that politicians deliberately frus-trate accountability by covering their tracks whenever feasible. Sattler et al.’s (2008: 1234)study of British monetary policy suggests that ‘British citizens simply have trouble gaugingthe efficacy of monetary policy. They approve of the policies but simply are not able to deter-mine if they have their intended impacts’. So neither the responsibility for policy decisions, northe nature of and responsibility for the downstream effects of policy, are usually obvious to thecitizen.

Third, it is possible to demand too comprehensive and transparent a rationality of civicjudgment. Brooks (2006) emphasises the ability of citizens to optimise the utility of the policyinformation they do possess by ‘reasoning heuristically’ to make ‘good enough’ civic judg-ments. Nor do citizens always expect politicians to reflect mechanically their preferences inpolicy choices; some citizens are perfectly aware that they are less informed than their

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representatives, and they respond rationally in this situation of asymmetric information bybestowing a degree of confidence in the latter (Bianco 1994: 150; Goot 2005: 193–4).

The noise which envelops the relationships among politicians, policies and outcomesmeans that the classic normative account of democracy as citizens choosing between bou-quets of policy offered by competing political formations rather oversimplifies the reality.Politicians have their own policy preferences in addition to ambitions for re-election. Theyseek to build political capital in order to achieve both these objectives. Given the limits oncitizen information and analytical capacity, politicians will often assess policies less on theirdistant and uncertain outcomes than on the implications for political capital of their proxi-mate and highly public announcements. Mayhew (2004: 61) noted that ‘politicians oftenget rewarded for taking positions rather than achieving effects’, so they engage in ‘positiontaking, defined here as the public enunciation of a judgmental statement on anything likelyto be of interest to political actors’. This is something a little less than what Hart (1987: 52)meant when he wrote that Lyndon Johnson ‘figured . . . that a new piece of legislation had tobe “performed” for the mass media so as to give that piece of legislation a fair chance ofbeing successful’, or that Rosanvallon (2006: 192) meant when he wrote that ‘decisionshave to be made theatrical in order for them to be converted into meaningful and effectiveacts’, but the idea of the first embodiment of policy as its announcement and explanation bypoliticians is a common theme of all three. The politician may or may not have privilegedaccess to information regarding the possible downstream outcomes of the policy afterimplementation, but one can be sure that his or her first reflex will be to imagine thepolicy in its politically elemental immediacy as an announcement—a potential boon orthreat to political capital.

Thus far we have been examining the implications of the concept of political capital, asembedded in the relations between politicians and citizens, for the adoption/performance ofpublic policy. But the achievement of the politician’s aim of pursuing policy preferences whileensuring re-election depends not only on citizens at large, but also and equally critically on theability to use political capital in relations with other power-holders, including other politicians.Note that politicians are the most eager students of one another’s political capital (Mayhew2004: 43–4), not only in the form of opinion polls but also of all manner of informal informationabout interpersonal relationships within the political world, career ambitions, factions and alli-ances, committee assignments, constituency prospects, fund-raising performance, hiring andloss of political staff, marital life, in short, of any sort of incremental insight into the ever-changing flow of events in political life and their probable future course (Neustadt 1990:129; Schabert 2009: 13, 25–6, 56). As Schabert (1989: 227) was told: ‘To succeed in govern-ment’, a mayoral aide explained, ‘you shouldn’t think in terms of issue politics, but of thisguy, that guy, and that other guy’.

They must use this information when they wish to pursue policy preferences and there-fore to induce collaboration or compliance from other political actors, that is, to apply orinvest political capital in a project. Here are the rewards and penalties represented by thep term in the political capital equation—the myriad of pressures, favours, threats and indul-gences which politicians can offer one another—fund-raising appearances, endorsements,access, appointments for supporters or donors, committee or party assignments, legislativelog-rolling, and other forms of cooperation or coercion limited only by the law and the pol-itical imagination (Neustadt 1990: 30; Galston 2006: 549; McDonough 2000: 119–57; Schabert1989: 167 –8).

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Political Judgment

The function f i signifies the exercise of political judgment, a variable function whichdepends upon the fit between the aptitudes, experience and skills of the political actor, onthe one hand, and the contingent historical context, on the other. The flux of public life,fortuna, means that the success of past exercises of political judgment is no guarantee ofsuccess in a different environment or context. This kind of judgment cannot be reduced tothe transparent inferential rationality of scientific or ethical reasoning. It benefits from, but isby no means limited to, the proficient forecasting of future events (Tetlock 2005). Arendtthought it ‘a highly mysterious process’ and Berlin agreed (Arendt 2000b: 20; Thiele 2006: 134).

Speaking of political judgment, Berlin (1996: 46) spoke of a gift which ‘entails, above all, acapacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicoloured, evanescentperpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too intermingled to be caught andpinned down and labeled like so many individual butterflies’. A politician must see

the data as elements in a single pattern, with their implications, to see them as symptoms of

past and future possibilities, to see them pragmatically – that is, in terms of what you or

others can or will do to them, or what they can or will do to others or to you.

Berlin’s concern was to portray political judgment as something intellectually more than anddifferent from the application of scientific and technological knowledge to public problems.Hariman’s account (2003: 294), 45 years later, emphasises something equally pragmatic:

Prudence is evident as a political actor meets with clients, talks with neighbors, works the

crowd, attends an event, joins the group, or makes a speech. If it is trait, virtue, or norm, it

is one that is evident as one does these things. If it is a skill, mode of reasoning, or form of

character, it is evident in the decisions and their rationales that define this way of ‘walking

through the world’. It may be seen at a glance or be discernible only over a long period of

time.

Political judgment then is in part dependent upon a deep understanding of the diverse par-ochialisms which any polity may boast. Its exercise is not an attempt to feign membershipin any and every constituency, but a kind of tacit hermeneutic insight permitting the ostenta-tious recognition of the language, markers, sacred cows and shibboleths of each, as well as ofthe construction of their political demands (Hariman 2003: 296; Steinberger 1993: 68–9, 286).This is the prerequisite for political performance intelligible to its intended audience. And thenature of the performance of policy takes on the lingua franca of these constituencies, withnarrative and metaphor playing a much larger role than the disciplinary vocabularies of econ-omics or public policy (Ankersmit 1996: 266; Fenno 1998: 5; Geuss 2008: 97 –8; McDonough2000: 51–3; Thiele 2006: 201 –76).

This exercise of what we might call rhetoric in the vernacular, where familiar words andassociations are fashioned into politically compelling performance is not always or only thepersuasive and possibly deceptive pursuit of support for policy and for the person performing.It may also be something like the reverse. In constant, exhausting, repetitious political perform-ance, as well as informally in the corridors of power, policy is often being made on the run. Thisimportant feature of political life has been nicely expressed by Thiele (2006: 71):

Judgments become available to us, in the sense that we gain awareness of their (conceptual)

import, only with their articulation. Prior to this event, proto-judgments formed experientially

already inform our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in important ways . . . Only at the moment of

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voicing a judgment do we, along with our listeners, discover that an assessment, evaluation,

and critical choice have been made. Subsequently, we may attempt to defend this judgment,

and often do so by mustering rational arguments that rely on general principles . . . The rules

and principles invoked are, as often as not, post facto rationalizations of intuited values.

Neustadt (1990: 154 –5) claimed that decisions which aimed at maximizing the president’s pol-itical capital made for ‘viable’ public policy. He meant something like what Arendt meant whenshe said that political judgment involved ‘thinking representatively’, that is, as Beiner (1993:109; cf. d’Entreves 2000) puts it, ‘political judgment must embrace the standpoints of boththe spectator and the actor’. Arendt was thinking both of what is called here civic judgmentand the demand for policy, as well as of what is called here political judgment. She did notmean, where a politician is ‘the actor’ in question, that judgment implied merely an exerciseof empathy nor a calculation of the maximization of the opinion term, o, in the shortterm—the pursuit of the merely popular. She meant that the goal of political judgmentmust be ‘to create communities that will be more than neutral sites for brokering self-interest’(Hajer 2003: 184) and ‘not [be] simply about finding solutions for pressing problems, but . . . asmuch about finding formats that generate trust among mutually interdependent actors’(Hariman 2003: 290; cf. Dunn 1990: 5). This ‘seeking the assent of others’ is a heavily mortgagedexercise in the absence of political capital and it should represent an investment with returns infurther capital.

Hariman (2003: 298 –301) offers a tripartite conception of political prudence which inci-sively captures the idea of political judgment proposed here. Calculative prudence involvesjudgments about the world and its future evolution in respect of some specific issue(s) andcourses of action. Normative prudence involves judgments about the trade-offs among objec-tives and means: ‘Politics is essentially the process that emerges when people have to nego-tiate a radical plurality of goods.’ Performative prudence involves politicians’ more or lesssuccessful incarnation of policies and representation of the polity. Here, judgments and intui-tions about political capital are liable to be critical, for what is at stake is normally more than arational exposition and defence of substantive policy. Such moments will also be those whichpermit citizens to form impressions as to the authenticity and empathetic qualities of the poli-tician. Those impressions remain potent long after most memories of gratification or disap-pointment about a specific policy have faded.

Conclusion

Political capital is a neutral concept. Much more of politics is about building a follow-ing—political capital—than about finding ‘solutions’ to public policy problems, but if andwhen such solutions are on offer, their execution will inevitably require political capital. Poli-tics is the exercise of effecting a rolling compromise, infinitely renewable, among the diver-sity of demands for policy at play in a polity, and that exercise is on the whole moredependent on the political capital which remains at the disposal of political leaders thanon any collective assessment by citizens of substantive policy required or of policy outcomesas such.

Reciprocal acts of civic and political judgment close the gap of representation. A concen-tration on political capital binds the representative to the represented and forms the on-goingfilament of accountability—what Urbinati (2006: 110 –19) calls the ‘soft power of judgment’—whose supposed near-disappearance between elections is often lamented.

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The centrality of political capital to political practice reminds us that in a democracy, thetemptation to stigmatise the persona publica as somehow unworthy of the citizenry is a futileshot across the wrong bow. Representatives and represented in a democracy are boundtogether in reciprocal acts of judgment; in a democracy, over time, neither is likely togreatly exceed or fall short of the value and values of the other.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the advice of Jason Alexander, Nomi Lazar, Patti Tamara

Lenard, Joseph McDonald, Gilles Paquet, Roland Paris, and two anonymous referees for this

journal. Any errors in the article remain his responsibility.

NOTE

∗ I have slightly altered the punctuation and sentence structure of this quote.

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