If we think of democratic consolidation as game played between the sovereign and the public, how is it that the players know what the other players know and how is it that they can correctly anticipate one another’s strategies?
Based on existing empirical and experimental evidence, traditional rationality or Bayesian update models suggest that common knowledge and conjecture do not exist. I offer a social psychology interpretation where shared expectations are defined by the context of the exchange between the sovereign and the public, the effects of players’ goals on the processing of stimuli, and the distillation of all potential primes through selective attention.
I test these propositions using data from a series of Politbarometer surveys in Slovenia from the Survey Research Center at the University of Ljubljana.
This work has implications for the dynamics and forms of democratic consolidation and stability as well as for the application of psychological precepts to game theory.
