This paper uses game theory to provide a common framework to address three questions: (a) Under what conditions is it possible for political elites in segmented societies to pursue accommodating strategies? (b) If elites choose such strategies over long periods of time, why do their followers continue to vote for them? (c) How can political institutions promote accommodating behavior?
The essence of the argument is that political elites perceive the political situation as a game of chicken, while the masses may see it as a prisoners' dilemma or deadlock. When elites take into account electoral considerations, a weighting scheme determines the nature of the composite game. This game need not be symmetric with respect to the ranking of payoffs of the different players. The framework explains not only the major independent variable of the consociational democracies literature concerning the accommodating behavior of elites, it explains one of the major criticisms against this literature as well: the phenomenon of elite-intitiated conflict. The same game theoretic framework is used to explain how Belgian institutions work.
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