CONCEPT
Partisan Mutual Adjustment
Lindblom's name for the process by which competing interest groups, each pursuing their own objectives through their own channels, produce policy outcomes through their interaction that no central planner designed — the mechanism through which democratic societies process disagreements they cannot resolve.
Partisan mutual adjustment is Lindblom's most counterintuitive contribution to political theory. It describes how competing partisans — each pursuing their own objectives, each responding to the behavior of the others, none coordinated by any central authority — produce collective outcomes through their interaction. The outcomes are not agreed upon. They are adjusted into. Each partisan modifies her behavior in response to the behavior of other partisans, not through explicit consensus but through the continuous, decentralized process of strategic adaptation that democratic institutions make possible. The concept challenges the assumption that good policy requires agreement on values or coordination by central authority.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The term is deliberately unlovely. 'Partisan' signals that the actors pursue particular interests rather than abstract conceptions of the common good. 'Mutual' signals that the adjustment is bilateral — each party changes in response to the others. 'Adjustment' signals that the outcome