Agmon, Shai & Bagg, Samuel. “In Praise of Friction: Mutual Interference, Parity, and the Benefits of Competition”, in S. Bagg and A. Moore (eds.) Democracy and Competition (Proceedings of the British Academy Series, 2026): 2219-243.
In Chapter 9, Shai Agmon and Samuel Bagg build upon Agmon’s distinction between ‘parallel’ and ‘friction’ competition—to develop an argument ‘in praise of friction’. Where ‘parallel’ mechanisms induce competitors to maximise their performance, independently of one another, on some absolute scale— thus allowing society to reap the rewards of their aggregated parallel efforts—‘frictional’ mechanisms require competitors to interact and even interfere with each other in order to come out on top, and it is the dynamic effects of these frictional interactions that generate broader social benefits. For Agmon and Bagg, in short, such frictional mechanisms are consistently undervalued. Institutional designers often attempt to encourage ‘competition’ by carving out spaces of protected non-interference, within which parties, media institutions, and other political actors can maximise their vote share, viewership, or donor base without active interference or contestation from rivals. Agmon and Bagg argue that this approach to regulating competition is misguided, and reflects a narrow view of democracy’s value. Parties do make some attempt to maximise their vote share by adopting broadly palatable positions, for instance, so parallel mechanisms do help generate the social benefits of democratic competition. Yet parties are not merely preference-takers— to a large degree, they shape the preferences of their voters—and this undermines simplistic stories about the benefits of parallel mechanisms. Much of the value of democratic competition stems rather from the way it encourages socially beneficial forms of friction—by incentivising rival parties or factions to expose the misdeeds and failures of opponents, for instance, and facilitating direct interaction among representatives of different views and interests. When political practices and institutions prioritise zones of non-interference over venues for such valuable interactive friction—relying only on parallel mechanisms—they enable party elites and other political insiders to monopolise power. This is only one of many examples of how underemphasis on friction can be detrimental. Indeed, Agmon and Bagg argue a similar bias even affects the regulation of legal and economic realms. Most critical for this volume, however, is the way their chapter—like many others—nuances the common demand to promote competition. In pointing out the limits of parallel mechanisms, and insisting on the importance of friction, it adds another layer of complexity to debates about electoral institutions as well as the broader structure of competition among ideas, movements, and organisations in any democratic society.
