Understanding Collective Decision Making: A Fitness Landscape Model Approach PDF
Preview Understanding Collective Decision Making: A Fitness Landscape Model Approach
Understanding Collective Decision Making GERRITS TEXT.indd 1 20/06/2017 13:18 GERRITS TEXT.indd 2 20/06/2017 13:18 Understanding Collective Decision Making A Fitness Landscape Model Approach Lasse Gerrits Department of Political Science, Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg, Germany Peter Marks Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA GERRITS TEXT.indd 3 20/06/2017 13:18 © Lasse Gerrits and Peter Marks 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931754 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781783473151 ISBN 978 1 78347 314 4 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78347 315 1 (eBook) Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire 2 0 GERRITS TEXT.indd 4 20/06/2017 13:18 Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 An uphill struggle 1 2 Models of social evolution: fitness landscapes 9 3 The transformation of fitness landscapes 42 4 The model 64 5 Memory of a dream: high-speed rail in the Netherlands 83 6 Enter in time: analysing dynamics in three empirical cases 136 7 Evolution in collective decision making 167 Appendix A Data processing and www.un-code.org 193 Appendix B Data collection 201 Appendix C Data-coding the high-speed railway study 205 References 221 Index 237 v GERRITS TEXT.indd 5 20/06/2017 13:18 GERRITS TEXT.indd 6 20/06/2017 13:18 Acknowledgements This book actually didn’t start as a book. It started as a casual conversa- tion on a lazy afternoon when we tried to do a quick sketch of a fitness landscape for the social sciences on a scratched whiteboard. It didn’t work. And so we thought we should try a little more. How hard can it be anyway? That was five years ago. The initial idea resulted in a full research programme that has become our main source of scientific inspiration and joy. This book is our own work, and we take sole responsibility for the con- tents. However, various people have made invaluable contributions and we would like to use this opportunity to thank them. First and foremost, we would like to thank our families for their extraor- dinary patience and endurance, even allowing us to use holidays as an excuse to push the research further. This is more than we deserve, really. A similar kind of patience was also present with our publisher Edward Elgar, in particular with Alex Pettifer, who understood that good research requires a lot of time (which is just a neat way of saying that we missed our deadlines by a mile . . . sorry!). We are proud that our book has become part of the portfolio of such a reputable publisher. We are very thankful to our supervisors and critical but supportive reviewers Sergey Gavrilets (University of Tennessee) and Geert Teisman (Erasmus University Rotterdam). They represented the two far ends we aimed to unite in this book: fitness landscapes as a model from theoreti- cal biology and a practice-oriented understanding of collective decision making. Without their patient help, the book would have lacked in many places. We hope we have managed to meet their high standards, perhaps that we have even reached the level of ‘real science’. Julian Stieg (Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg) deserves all credit for developing un-code.org. We originally just set out to have an online place to store our raw data, but Julian turned it into a mature data processing and visualization tool, free for everyone to use. In addition, he helped out with translating and sorting the raw data of the Gotthard case. Julian has been a very valuable team member who brought new skills to the project. We would like to thank Wouter Spekkink (University of Manchester) for his time and creativity during the early phase of the research when many ideas and theories were still shifting shape day by day. Those brainstorms vii GERRITS TEXT.indd 7 20/06/2017 13:18 viii Understanding collective decision making were immensely helpful in focusing the research. Wouter’s Event-Sequence Database (ESD) was a major source of inspiration for the way un-code. org works. We also would like to thank Mary-Lee Rhodes (Trinity College Dublin) for productive brainstorms about fitness landscapes and an extraordinary Irish barbecue (Irish, in the sense that it rained, but that didn’t make the food any less delicious!), which helped us zoom in on the questions that matter in public administration. We already mentioned that Julian helped us out with the raw data per- taining to the Gotthard case, which was not an easy task because many policy papers of the local communities were hard to come by. Other people also helped with the empirical studies. Sumet Ongkittikul (Thailand Development and Research Institute) very generously introduced us to key people working with the Airport Railway Link as well as scientists in urban and transport planning in Bangkok. Interviews for the Sports in the City study were done together with Iris Korthagen (Rathenau Institute), which was not only useful but above all fun. We are thankful for all the help we got and humbled by the interest our research generated. We hope we can live up to the expectations. Parts of this research were funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, grant no. 451-10-022. GERRITS TEXT.indd 8 20/06/2017 13:18 1. An uphill struggle 1.1 KING OF THE HILL . . . FOR A DAY Our story starts with snow, and lots of it. In fact, there was nothing really special about it when it fell during winter 2013 because it was exactly the same kind of snow that falls every year in Europe during winter. However, for Netherlands Railways (NS), it was disastrous. NS had just proudly introduced its brand-new Fyra high-speed train sets for passenger service, and the snow brutally exposed the train’s many weaknesses. It collected in the air vents, tore off the steel casing that was supposed to protect the equipment under the carriages, and played havoc with the electronics. However, the trains would have failed even without snow. Earlier, when the weather was still fair, roof plates had come off during testing, as had one of the access doors. But things were also wrong inside the train. The inner doors separating the compartments did not always open when required, and some lavatories were installed incorrectly. When trains were stowed at the railway yard during the night, batteries underneath the carriages had caught fire. Come spring 2013, NS was forced to admit that it couldn’t get the trains back into shape. It appeared that there were too many design and construction flaws. The train’s constructor, Italian rolling stock manu- facturer AnsaldoBreda, had been offered many opportunities to fix the flaws but never really delivered satisfactorily. Consequently, and years after the original deadline to deliver operational train sets, the contract with AnsaldoBreda was formally terminated in August 2013. This put NS in a situation where it had to run a high-speed railway concession costing about 100 million euros per year with neither the proper trains to do it nor the time to fix the problems. In the end, the Dutch government had to step in to rescue NS from going under completely. This created real financial trou- bles for both NS and the Ministry of Infrastructure and caused distrust among passengers who were left in the cold. The Fyra train sets were to be the concluding piece of an ambitious project to build a high-speed rail connection between Brussels and Amsterdam. The Netherlands has a relatively solid reputation when it comes to planning and implementing complex projects such as this one. So how exactly did this problematic situation come about? We need to look 1 GERRITS TEXT.indd 1 20/06/2017 13:18
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