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POLITICAL CAPITAL
Richard D. French
Published online: 11 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Richard D. French (2011) POLITICAL CAPITAL, Representation, 47:2, 215-230,
DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2011.581086
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POLITICAL CAPITAL

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Richard D. French

Political capital is a concept used regularly in the media though largely ignored by political theorythe
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 representation 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 information good.

Introduction
Political capital: demagogues are said to exploit events to make it; the hapless, inept or
unlucky contrive to waste it; canny legislators husband it by the judicious distribution of
favours and the timely rolling of logs; prudent governments hesitate at the prospect of its
loss; the newly elected or politically blessed revel in its plenitude. But just what is it? What
can we know about it?
The article views politics as a set of activities and practices to which the existential situation of the elected representative (and of the political appointees, such as American cabinet
secretaries, directly dependent upon them) is central. Manifestly, autocrats can accumulate
political capital, but here the focus is upon the practising politician as a crucial agent of
democracy.
In the life and practice of politics, political capital is central. The democratic state may
possess a monopoly on the legitimate deployment of coercive force, and various ofces of
state may comport ofcial powers and authorities, but it is remarkable how little these
factors play in the day-to-day push-and-pull of democratic life. Political capital is constituted
by the store of mostly intangible assets which politicians use to induce compliance from
other power holders, such as leaders in business, labour, the professions, the media and
civil society, and from other specically political actors, including those in their own political
movement, and notably in the case of presidents and prime ministers, from their own close
colleagues 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 conguration of forces in a particular political struggle, in the strength of one specic political party or
movement relative to another, then we must attend to political capital as a key, historically
contingent factor in outcomes.
Politicians are said to be more or less powerful. When they assume ofcenot an inevitable prerequisite for political power, but the paradigm casethey are said to take power, or

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to be in power. The argument is that political capital is the form that power takes in formal
politics, that the concept of capital provides insight into this species of power, and that the
statics and dynamics of political capital illuminate some fundamental features of democratic
life.
The second section of this article examines some theoretical arguments surrounding the
transfer from economics to other social sciences of the concept of capital. The third section
species the characteristics of political capital. The following three sections examine the
three key determinants of political capital: opinion, policy and political judgment. A short
nal section outlines some implications of this analysis.

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The Metaphor of Capital

The last two decades have seen the widespread adoption of capital in a variety of social
science disciplines, to signify a stock or store of economically unconventional assets used as
resources by individuals, collectivities or institutions. We have, most commonly, social
capital, but also human capital, ecological capital, cultural capital, symbolic capital, moral
capital, media capital, organisational capital, institutional capital, and so on, up to and including political capital. These metaphorical forms of capital have in common that unlike conventional capital, they are not easily monetised, nor alienable, nor uncontroversially subject to the
conventions of accounting.
The concept of social capital, the most widely employed, has been the object of strong
critique. Arrow, for example, has argued that the concept of social capital be abandoned
because social capital does not imply the sacrice of present for future benet (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 it
is embedded in relations of power and exploitation in capitalist society. Social capital is then
an obfuscation of that potentially emancipatory insight. For Fine, capital must be the analytical
centrepiece of a critical political economy whose task is to challenge the status quo and to
direct attention to systematic sources of power corresponding to disadvantage (2001: 198).
At this metatheoretical level, there are at least two weaknesses in Fines argument. First,
he does not give one who does not share his political agenda a strong reason to share his
analysis. Second, he assumes for the social sciences as a whole a unied conceptual vocabulary
which appears more distant than ever.
One cannot, however, gainsay Fines searching examination of what he calls the chaos
of contemporary scholarship employing the term social capital. He shows that it is often rolled
out opportunistically and supercially and just as promptly forgotten. He would presumably
agree with Hacking (1999: 50), for whom, There is no harm in one person stretching a metaphor, but when many do, they kill it. At a lower frequency, the same critique can be said to
hold for the concept of political capital. The authors informal survey of several dozen uses
of 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 usage
in the mass media, is to denote a non-monetary asset used in politics for the private and instrumental purposes of political agents and organisations. Each form of life and work evolves its
own logic, its own vocabulary and its own style of reasoning. The employment of the
concept of political capital to describe politics is not going to go away. The purpose of this

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POLITICAL CAPITAL

article is to try to deepen our understanding of political capital in formal politicsto create a
larger and better dened target, as the case may be. The article begins from the point where
the vernacular and the predominant scholarly usage intersect.
Bourdieu has offered the most elaborate account of political capital, as part of his sociology 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 the
assets which permit the reproduction of relations of domination and deception in societies
which are divided by their differential distribution. Political capital is a form of symbolic
power, credit founded on belief and recognition . . . [it] is the product of subjective acts of recognition . . . 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 whose
sincerity is only exceeded by his or her naivety (1991: 206, 209, 213, 214 15). Bourdieus work
is full of stimulating insights, incisive formulations and provocative critique, but his political
analysis has a certain mechanical quality which dees the subtlety of his theory, and which
makes its systematic disenchantment of politics like a story whose end we can see coming
from far too far away (cf. Lane 2006: 95).
In lieu of the pessimistic certainties of the Bourdieuian political eld, this article is
founded upon the more contingent and spontaneous possibilities of a world something like
that 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 oor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep aoat 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 rst instance from representation, in particular from the fundamental antinomy that representatives must be from the people but
cannot remain of the people.
This gap in representation, this separation between citizens and politician, originates in
the need for the group to create itself politically by its members dispossess[ing] themselves in
favor 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 the
representative 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 signicance: to rule in a modern state is by denition 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 representative? If the group once creates itself politically by dispossessing itself in favour of a representative, the act of dispossession means exactly that the representative is then free to dene
and redene the group by speech and action, not always with the interests of the original constituency 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 the
representative from the represented.
Persons engaged in the private spherethe public implications of what they do notwithstandingoperate against a speciable and nite professional and moral horizon. An
occupation carries with it a set of objectives and expectations which may be controversial
but is not in practice inexhaustible. The persona publica, by contrast, offers him- or herself in
pursuit of the good of society. This role operates under every eye against an innite moral
horizon, an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly controversial variety of objectives and values
against which a public person may be judged. One who bears this kind of public responsibility
lives a life no longer framed by considerations commensurable with those framing the lives of
the citizens they represent, and this is the gap which separates the representative from the
represented for as long as the former represents the latter (cf. Schabert 1989: 219; Strauss
1959: 16 17; Thiele 2006: 10 11). It is not normally power which weighs most heavily on
the political shoulders, it is the prospect of its absence.
The prospect of the absence of political power ows from the represented, the constituency, closing the gap or completing the circle of representation. The representative gap is
lled by reciprocal acts of judgment on the parts of the political gure and constituents.
The product of these reciprocal acts of judgment is political capital. It is something along
these 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 phenomenon that comes into being in the relation between the representative and the person represented and cannot be claimed by either one of the two parties.

How then can we characterise political capital? It is, rst, a phenomenon which inheres in the
relations 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 presidency
emphasise that taking positions, sponsoring legislation, and employing the prerogatives of
the presidency usually reduces the capacity to do so at some later time. Political capital is
nite and uncertainly renewable.
Fourth, as the product of the reciprocal judgments of political actors and citizen-constituents, 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: difcult to appropriate or
monopolise (despite constant attempts to do so); rapidly depreciable; difcult to cost, but
often expensive to create; non-rivalrous in any given application (my consumption, as political
capital is applied to induce my compliance, does not reduce yours); non-excludable in application (I can only with the greatest difculty prevent your consumption); jointness of supply
offering large economies of scale (production costs are not directly proportional to the
number of consumers, i.e., the number of persons from whom compliance may be sought);
and pregnant with externalities which are difcult to foresee or to manage.
Political actors seek to maximise political capital. The judgments of policy, politics and
politicians 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 investment or application of political capital by a political actoron other politicians, power holders
in society, citizens at large, from whom compliance is soughtrepresents a commitment

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POLITICAL CAPITAL

which over time, all other things being equal, tends to reduce the stock of capital available to
the 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 on
the particular interests of consumers. Citizens who are indifferent to policy and politics,
whose demand for policy is negligible, largely exclude themselves from the production and
the destruction of political capital. About 20% of the citizens of the industrial democracies
live within the connes of the scal, criminal and trafc laws of their countries, and benet
from its public goods, but choose not to take much if any part in political life. They do not
escape the ambit of the coercive powers of their state, but neither are they subject or
object of the varying capital of its political actors. On the other hand, those who have a
demand for policy, be it ever so general as a preference for right or left, or for certain demographic characteristics in ofce-holders, or for the civic duty of voting, cannot exclude themselves from the operation of political capitalthat is, from judging political actors and from
offering support or resistance to their projects. The more intense, direct and continuing the
citizens demand for policy, the more intense, direct and continuing his or her role in the creation and destruction of political capital.
Political capital is the resource which political actors deploy to structure the incentives of
other actors in society. A politicians relative capacity to change incentive structures (cf.
Dowding 1991: 48), where there is a demand for policy, is a function of the amount of political
capital at his or her command.
The determinants of political capital of a political actor are opinion (aggregated civic
judgment), policy (the sanctions and rewardssubstantive policy, penalties, punishments,
appointments, patronageat the disposal, or potentially at the disposal, of the political
actor) and what shall be called political judgment (the reciprocal of civic judgment, the judgment of the politician in the deployment of political capital). Formally, PCt f i (op)t. Political
capital is a function of the interaction of opinion and policy at time t. This function, f i, is a variable function which denotes the exercise of political judgment, the discernment and skill of the
politician in a specic political context.
This equation adjusts from period to period as events and actions modify political
capital. For any political actor, assume that the combination of her actions and the relevant
political events over, say, the six-month period 1, will determine, say, 80% of her political
capital at time t at the beginning of period 2. What will have changed, principally, over
period 1 is o, opinion about her, her policies (the exercise of p), her party and the state of
the world as it effects their positioningthe 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 policiesprerogatives such as voting,
nominating, advocating, endorsing, criticising, funding, tabling, which are deployed in political
lifeand in part of opinionthat is, reputation, prestige, popularity or approval enjoyed by a
politician. The two are of course intimately linked. The agents in question compete in exercising political judgment about the accumulation and investment of these resources. They may
be legislators or executives, but they have in common that their stock of political capital determines their relative efcacy.
Much of what matters in the management of political capital eludes a politicians control
(Pierson 2000: 258). The political environment is made of multiple forms and perspectives, as
Arendt (2000a: 204) described it:

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the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives 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 signicance 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 difculty of listening to so
many voices, where making oneself heard and obeyed . . . of being forced to decide in real
time, life-size, scale one, without any assurance of cause and effect constitute the particular
constraints of public talk.
This means that politics is a practice for which neither professional norms, algorithmic
methods nor rational transaction sufce. It is an altogether more contentious, competitive,
unpredictable and improvisatory phenomenon (Dunn 2000; Geuss 2008: esp. 15, 97; Geuss
2009: 34 6; Philp 2007; Sabl 2002: 16; Schabert 2009: 30, 147 50). Politics is a struggle
against the immanent prospect of insufcient political capital and the absence of power; an
unequal struggle moreover, one in which the means of struggle are protean, the context
unpredictable, the rules customary and obscure, and the strategy that of a multi-player
game under incomplete and imperfect information, a game of innite iterations and no
equilibrium.

Opinion
Being seen and heard: the actions and speech of political gures create impressions
among citizens, who exercise civic judgment to form opinions, which are a critical determinant
of political capital, which permits political actors to pursue their policy objectives and to anticipate re-election.
The need to be seen and heard means that politics is in important measure a series of
performances (Schabert 2009: 4). Politicians, whether they consciously wish it or not, are attributed a political style, a style of which they may be themselves no more than semiconscious, but
which 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 transitory
aesthetic perceptions, that a political system is continually reinvented through performances both scheduled and spontaneous, and that political power is very difcult to
grasp, 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 be
the same thing as the application of force or the rational operation of administrative
practices.
The impressions formed by political style are importantly composed of reactions, often
inarticulable, to non-verbal cues or spontaneous expression given off involuntarily by political
actors (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 the
appearance, 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, or
perhaps 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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POLITICAL CAPITAL

There is a limit to what calculation, self-censorship, scripting and editing (Page 1976)
can do for political style in esh-and-blood. This not the end of the challenges. Politicians
have every reason to distinguish among audiences and try to tailor their performances to
their audience; some publics are far more consequential than others for the formation of
political capital. In the constituency, the representative usually has a good idea as to
certain friends and adversaries, but even there most of the population does not lend
itself easily to this kind of categorisation (Fenno 1978: 234; Jacobs and Shapiro 2000: 11;
Sidlow 2008: 73).
Outside the constituency, the politician thinks rst in terms of proximate audiences
the media, other political actors and those parts of the public likely to be attentive. But the
ultimate reality for the individual politician is whenever one looks for the court of public
opinion in operation, one will always nd particular persons there instead (Runciman
2008: 139).
So as much as politicians may want to consolidate their base of support, appeal to
swing voters, take credit or avoid blame (Weaver 1986; Mayhew 2004), frame or prime
issues (Druckman 2001; Druckman and Holmes 2004; Funk 1999), or otherwise make strategic use of opportunities to perform (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000: 3 26) and thus create political capital, there are formidable behavioural and informational impediments to be
overcome (McGraw 2003).
How do citizens make their half of the reciprocal judgments that go to compose political
capital? How do they form opinions of politicians? It is widely understood that most citizens
severely 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 political
opinions by a myriad of informal means: the media, conversations with friends, signals from
party afliation, social stereotyping, information from employers, professional, union and
civil society organisations, endorsements, and other low-cost, low-deliberation methods. Political institutions help to shape information useful to citizens (Lupia and McCubbins 2000; Sniderman 2000). Committed partisans aside, those who have less information will form opinions
which are less stable, less favourable, more responsive to impressions of character and personality than to issue positioning, and more easily affected by the tenor of media coverage than
those who are more sophisticated.
There is little evidence that political efforts to persuade citizens to change their basic
positions 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 their
position by grabbing the publics attention and by walking it through detailed and complex
reasoning. As an American politician once said, Its not the issues that can kill you, its the
way you handle the issues (cf. Fenno 1978: 241). So politicians attempt to frame and to
prime images and issues in ways which will induce positive responses and may chase issues
which offer the opportunity of favourable positioning.
What are the typical dynamics of aggregate opinion? Erikson et al. have offered an ambitious synthesis of the evolution of presidential approval. While the opinions of some citizens
will vary almost randomly over relatively short periods of time, these uctuations will cancel
one another out in aggregate public opinion. Much opinion is xed by partisan loyalties
and when major events move opinion in the aggregate, partisans of different allegiance (in
the case in point, Republicans and Democrats) move in the same direction, albeit from different levels of approval for any given incumbent. There remains a group of unattached citizens
who 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 citizens, moving in relatively modest numbers, help cause macropolitical outcomes to change
(2002: 432).
Politicians obstinate determination to create and preserve political capital, notwithstanding the difculty of the task, becomes clearer when we observe the underlying momentum of entropy which functions inexorably from the moment of electoral victory. Brace and
Hinckley (1992: 31 44) call it the decay curve or the cycle of deating expectations while
Light (1991: 10) calls it the cycle of decreasing inuence 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. The
newly elected politician enters ofce in the aura of victory and public approval, and for
most politicians, most of the time, it is all downhill from there. The political honeymoon, or
etat 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 average
month-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 that
the honeymoon is the product of a media holiday during which journalistic criticism is muted
and citizens are not exposed to negative information about the new incumbent. After the honeymoon, presidents make decisions which disappoint members of their winning coalition,
voters with unrealistic expectations become disillusioned, the frictional costs of governing
take 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, applications of political capital in preceding periods. It is generally accepted that negative information has a greater impact than positive information. Erikson et al. show that the effects
of major events on presidential approval have a half-life of less than a year and observe
that for economic conditions voters discount the past with an exponential decay (2002: 57,
244 5). Thus if citizens forget or discount more distant eventsthose more than several
months ago at the longestthen politicians have to believe that its never over until its

FIGURE 1
Average monthly approval ratings for seven presidents of the United States
Source: Erikson et al. (2002: 38).

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POLITICAL CAPITAL

over, and that building political capital for the next election remains the only rational course of
action.
Note however that, absent the indulgence of the political gods, the effort to build will
more often be a defensive struggle simply to preserve capital. The arrival of exogenous
events which bless incumbents with a renewed popularity is out of the control of the political actors themselves, though clearly how they respond makes a great difference to the ultimate outcome. Conventional wisdom suggests that Margaret Thatcher and George Bush
Senior achieved unprecedented political capital from their actions in the wake of entirely
unpredictable aggression by distant autocrats with regional or domestic considerations
primary in their minds. But this does not mean that the intentional diversion of public attention through foreign adventures is a durably effective recourse for democratic leaders in
need of political capital (Brace and Hinckley 1992: 91 114; Lai and Reiter 2005; Erikson
et al. 2002: 48 57; Mana et al. 1990). The tail, it seems, does not often wag the dog very
hard nor for very long.

Policy
If the opinion variable is the dominant one in the composition of political capital, then
what is the role of p, policy? Policy is composed of the rewards and penalties which a political
actor can use to obtain compliance. Citizens want policy agreement from politicians (Erikson
et al. 2002: 31). They are disappointed by measures which seem to counter their preferences
and are gratied by those which appear to full them. But this is no more than the beginning of
the story.
First, it is clear that neither politicians nor citizens have very certain epistemological
bases on which to form expectations about most policy, most of the time. To adapt a loose
version of the institutional economics vocabulary: political promises, engagements or undertakings are incomplete, non-transparent contracts, executed in a noisy eld, under conditions
of severe asymmetry of information, and enforceable mostly by the crude and lumpy (all or
nothing) mechanisms of democratic politics (Young 1991: 133). Uncertainty, principal-agent
problems, 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 latters assessments of public preferences are equally fragile. An electoral mandate is the rarest of phenomena (Grossback et al. 2005; Shamir et al. 2008).
Second, it is by no means clear that citizens are in a position to demand accountability
after the fact from their representatives. Politics and policy constitute a world of unintended
consequences. Besides, Jacobs and Shapiro (2000: 21) note that politicians deliberately frustrate 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 gauging
the efcacy of monetary policy. They approve of the policies but simply are not able to determine if they have their intended impacts. So neither the responsibility for policy decisions, nor
the nature of and responsibility for the downstream effects of policy, are usually obvious to the
citizen.
Third, it is possible to demand too comprehensive and transparent a rationality of civic
judgment. Brooks (2006) emphasises the ability of citizens to optimise the utility of the policy
information they do possess by reasoning heuristically to make good enough civic judgments. Nor do citizens always expect politicians to reect mechanically their preferences in
policy 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 by

bestowing a degree of condence in the latter (Bianco 1994: 150; Goot 2005: 193 4).
The noise which envelops the relationships among politicians, policies and outcomes
means that the classic normative account of democracy as citizens choosing between bouquets of policy offered by competing political formations rather oversimplies the reality.
Politicians have their own policy preferences in addition to ambitions for re-election. They
seek to build political capital in order to achieve both these objectives. Given the limits on
citizen information and analytical capacity, politicians will often assess policies less on their
distant and uncertain outcomes than on the implications for political capital of their proximate and highly public announcements. Mayhew (2004: 61) noted that politicians often
get rewarded for taking positions rather than achieving effects, so they engage in position
taking, dened here as the public enunciation of a judgmental statement on anything likely
to be of interest to political actors. This is something a little less than what Hart (1987: 52)
meant when he wrote that Lyndon Johnson gured . . . that a new piece of legislation had to
be performed for the mass media so as to give that piece of legislation a fair chance of
being successful, or that Rosanvallon (2006: 192) meant when he wrote that decisions
have to be made theatrical in order for them to be converted into meaningful and effective
acts, but the idea of the rst embodiment of policy as its announcement and explanation by
politicians is a common theme of all three. The politician may or may not have privileged
access to information regarding the possible downstream outcomes of the policy after
implementation, but one can be sure that his or her rst reex will be to imagine the
policy in its politically elemental immediacy as an announcementa potential boon or
threat to political capital.
Thus far we have been examining the implications of the concept of political capital, as
embedded in the relations between politicians and citizens, for the adoption/performance of
public policy. But the achievement of the politicians aim of pursuing policy preferences while
ensuring re-election depends not only on citizens at large, but also and equally critically on the
ability to use political capital in relations with other power-holders, including other politicians.
Note that politicians are the most eager students of one anothers political capital (Mayhew
2004: 43 4), not only in the form of opinion polls but also of all manner of informal information
about interpersonal relationships within the political world, career ambitions, factions and alliances, committee assignments, constituency prospects, fund-raising performance, hiring and
loss of political staff, marital life, in short, of any sort of incremental insight into the everchanging ow 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 government, a mayoral aide explained, you shouldnt think in terms of issue politics, but of this
guy, that guy, and that other guy.
They must use this information when they wish to pursue policy preferences and therefore to induce collaboration or compliance from other political actors, that is, to apply or
invest political capital in a project. Here are the rewards and penalties represented by the
p term in the political capital equationthe myriad of pressures, favours, threats and indulgences which politicians can offer one anotherfund-raising appearances, endorsements,
access, appointments for supporters or donors, committee or party assignments, legislative
log-rolling, and other forms of cooperation or coercion limited only by the law and the political imagination (Neustadt 1990: 30; Galston 2006: 549; McDonough 2000: 119 57; Schabert
1989: 167 8).

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Political Judgment
The function f i signies the exercise of political judgment, a variable function which
depends upon the t between the aptitudes, experience and skills of the political actor, on
the one hand, and the contingent historical context, on the other. The ux of public life,
fortuna, means that the success of past exercises of political judgment is no guarantee of
success in a different environment or context. This kind of judgment cannot be reduced to
the transparent inferential rationality of scientic or ethical reasoning. It benets from, but is
by no means limited to, the procient forecasting of future events (Tetlock 2005). Arendt
thought 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, a
capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicoloured, evanescent
perpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too intermingled to be caught and
pinned down and labeled like so many individual butteries. 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.

Berlins concern was to portray political judgment as something intellectually more than and
different from the application of scientic and technological knowledge to public problems.
Harimans 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 dene 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 parochialisms which any polity may boast. Its exercise is not an attempt to feign membership
in any and every constituency, but a kind of tacit hermeneutic insight permitting the ostentatious recognition of the language, markers, sacred cows and shibboleths of each, as well as of
the 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 the
nature of the performance of policy takes on the lingua franca of these constituencies, with
narrative and metaphor playing a much larger role than the disciplinary vocabularies of economics or public policy (Ankersmit 1996: 266; Fenno 1998: 5; Geuss 2008: 97 8; McDonough
2000: 51 3; Thiele 2006: 201 76).
This exercise of what we might call rhetoric in the vernacular, where familiar words and
associations are fashioned into politically compelling performance is not always or only the
persuasive 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 performance, as well as informally in the corridors of power, policy is often being made on the run. This
important 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 presidents political capital made for viable public policy. He meant something like what Arendt meant when
she said that political judgment involved thinking representatively, that is, as Beiner (1993:
109; cf. dEntreves 2000) puts it, political judgment must embrace the standpoints of both
the spectator and the actor. Arendt was thinking both of what is called here civic judgment
and the demand for policy, as well as of what is called here political judgment. She did not
mean, where a politician is the actor in question, that judgment implied merely an exercise
of empathy nor a calculation of the maximization of the opinion term, o, in the short
termthe pursuit of the merely popular. She meant that the goal of political judgment
must be to create communities that will be more than neutral sites for brokering self-interest
(Hajer 2003: 184) and not [be] simply about nding solutions for pressing problems, but . . . as
much about nding formats that generate trust among mutually interdependent actors
(Hariman 2003: 290; cf. Dunn 1990: 5). This seeking the assent of others is a heavily mortgaged
exercise in the absence of political capital and it should represent an investment with returns in
further capital.
Hariman (2003: 298 301) offers a tripartite conception of political prudence which incisively captures the idea of political judgment proposed here. Calculative prudence involves
judgments about the world and its future evolution in respect of some specic issue(s) and
courses of action. Normative prudence involves judgments about the trade-offs among objectives and means: Politics is essentially the process that emerges when people have to negotiate a radical plurality of goods. Performative prudence involves politicians more or less
successful incarnation of policies and representation of the polity. Here, judgments and intuitions about political capital are liable to be critical, for what is at stake is normally more than a
rational exposition and defence of substantive policy. Such moments will also be those which
permit citizens to form impressions as to the authenticity and empathetic qualities of the politician. Those impressions remain potent long after most memories of gratication or disappointment about a specic policy have faded.

Conclusion
Political capital is a neutral concept. Much more of politics is about building a followingpolitical capitalthan about nding solutions to public policy problems, but if and
when such solutions are on offer, their execution will inevitably require political capital. Politics is the exercise of effecting a rolling compromise, innitely renewable, among the diversity of demands for policy at play in a polity, and that exercise is on the whole more
dependent on the political capital which remains at the disposal of political leaders than
on any collective assessment by citizens of substantive policy required or of policy outcomes
as such.
Reciprocal acts of civic and political judgment close the gap of representation. A concentration on political capital binds the representative to the represented and forms the on-going
lament of accountabilitywhat Urbinati (2006: 110 19) calls the soft power of judgment
whose supposed near-disappearance between elections is often lamented.

POLITICAL CAPITAL

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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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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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SMITH, M.J.

Richard French is CN-Tellier Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
of the University of Ottawa. He is working on an account of political reason intended to be
more realistic than those postulated in various academic attempts to make policy-making
less political and more rational or reasonable. Email: Richard.French@uOttawa.ca