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William H. Riker
William Harrison Riker (September 22, 1920 – June 26, 1993) was an American political scientist who is prominent for applying game theory and mathematics to political science. He helped to establish University of Rochester as a center of behavioral revolution in political science. Early life William Harrison Riker was born on September 22, 1920, in Des Moines, Iowa. He had 4 children, 2 sons and 2 daughters with wife Mary Elizabeth. He earned his bachelor's degree in economics at Indiana's DePauw University in 1942 and received his Ph.D at Harvard University in 1948. While a student at DePauw, he was initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Before his Ph.D, Riker worked at the RCA (then Radio Corporation of America), where he worked as a time-and-motion analyst. Career Riker took on a professorship at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin (then Lawrence College), where he published ''The Theory of Political Coalitions'' (1962). In 1962, he became the chair of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Des Moines, Iowa
Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, which was shortened to "Des Moines" in 1857. It is located on, and named after, the Des Moines River, which likely was adapted from the early French name, ''Rivière des Moines,'' meaning "River of the Monks". The city's population was 214,133 as of the 2020 census. The six-county metropolitan area is ranked 83rd in terms of population in the United States with 699,292 residents according to the 2019 estimate by the United States Census Bureau, and is the largest metropolitan area fully located within the state. Des Moines is a major center of the US insurance industry and has a sizable financial services and publishing business base. The city was credited as the "number one spot for U.S. insurance companies" in a ''Business Wire'' articl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Positive Political Theory
Positive political theory (PPT) or explanatory political theory is the study of politics using formal methods such as social choice theory, game theory, and statistical analysis. In particular, social choice theoretic methods are often used to describe and (axiomatically) analyze the performance of rules or institutions. The outcomes of the rules or institutions described are then analyzed by game theory, where the individuals/parties/nations involved in a given interaction are modeled as ''rational'' agents playing a game, guided by self-interest. Based on this assumption, the outcome of the interactions can be predicted as an equilibrium of the game. The founder of the field was William H. Riker. In his book '' The Theory of Political Coalitions'' (1962), he applied the principles of game theory to the study of politics. The original creation of PPT was developed while Riker was the leader of Rochester School of Political Science, generating the Rochester School movement. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Public Affairs Press
Public Affairs Press ( – mid-1980s) was a book publisher in Washington, D.C., owned and often edited by Morris Bartel Schnapper (1912–1999). History According to notional successor Peter Osnos of the 1997-founded PublicAffairs: For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner, Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors... His legacy will endure in the books to come. Supreme Court Case In 1961, '' Pub. Affairs Associates, Inc. v. Rickover'', 369 U.S. 111 (1962), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the circuit court's decision should be vacated because the facts of the case were too unclear. Remanded to district court to create an "adequate and full-bodied record.". The case concerned whether or not speeches written by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in the course of his duties to the federal government of the United States were copyrightable. Generally, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eamonn Butler
Eamonn Butler (born 1953) is a British economist. He is the co-founder and Director of the Adam Smith Institute. Early life Eamonn Butler was born in 1953. His brother is Stuart Butler.Michael David Kandiah, Anthony Seldon, ''Ideas and Think Tanks in Contemporary Britain'', Routledge, 2014, Volume 1, pp. 73-7/ref> He graduated from the University of St Andrews. and also studied at the University of Aberdeen. Career Butler worked on pensions and welfare issues for the United States House of Representatives in Washington DC, before returning to the UK where he served as editor of the ''British Insurance Broker Monthly''. He co-founded the Adam Smith Institute in London with his brother Stuart and Madsen Pirie, both graduates from the University of St Andrews. He now serves as its Director. He is author of books on the work of three economists: ''Hayek: His Contribution to the Economic and Political Thought of Our Time''; ''Milton Friedman: A Guide to his Economic Thought''; ''L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McKelvey–Schofield Chaos Theorem
The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem is a result in social choice theory. It states that if preferences are defined over a multidimensional policy space, then majority rule is in general unstable: there is no Condorcet winner. Furthermore, any point in the space can be reached from any other point by a sequence of majority votes. The theorem can be thought of as showing that Arrow's impossibility theorem holds when preferences are restricted to be concave in \mathbb^. The median voter theorem shows that when preferences are restricted to be single-peaked on the real line, Arrow's theorem does not hold, and the median voter's ideal point is a Condorcet winner. The chaos theorem shows that this good news does not continue in multiple dimensions. Richard McKelvey initially proved the theorem for Euclidean preferences. Norman Schofield extended the theorem to the more general class of concave preferences. The figure shows an example. There are three voters in the electorate, with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem in social choice theory that states that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting the specified set of criteria: '' unrestricted domain'', '' non-dictatorship'', ''Pareto efficiency'', and ''independence of irrelevant alternatives''. The theorem is often cited in discussions of voting theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem is named after economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his doctoral thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book ''Social Choice and Individual Values''. The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare". In short, the theorem states that no rank-order electoral syst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heresthetic
Heresthetic is an approach to understanding how political actors manipulate the decision-making process so they can win. Heresthetic is a positive political theory, including aspects of game theory, public choice theory, rational choice theory, and social choice theory to political science. Political scientist William H. Riker is considered the creator and one of the most prominent supports of theory. Description Riker argues that herestheticians win because they compel or persuade others to join them in voting or political coalitions. Heresthetic focuses both on the use of rhetoric and political strategy. Riker argues that there are three vital components to heresthetic. # Agenda control: political agents may structure debate in ways that highlight favorable or eliminate undesirable policy alternatives. Depending upon the order that policy options are discussed, debate can produce different outcomes, including outcomes that are not preferred by the heresthetician. The order of cho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Federalism
Federalism is a combined or compound mode of government that combines a general government (the central or "federal" government) with regional governments (Province, provincial, State (sub-national), state, Canton (administrative division), cantonal, territorial, or other sub-unit governments) in a single political system, dividing the powers between the two. Federalism in the modern era was first adopted in the unions of states during the Old Swiss Confederacy. Federalism differs from Confederation, confederalism, in which the general level of government is subordinate to the regional level, and from devolution within a unitary state, in which the regional level of government is subordinate to the general level. It represents the central form in the pathway of regional integration or separation, bounded on the less integrated side by confederalism and on the more integrated side by devolution within a unitary state. Examples of a federation or federal province or state include ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rational Choice Theory
Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to political economist and philosopher, Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them.Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli, Frank Webster (2000). ''Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present'', London: SAGE Publications. It also suggests that an individual's self-driven rational actions will help better the overall economy. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand. Rationality can be used as an assumption for the behaviour of individuals in a wide range of contexts outside of economics. It is also used in political science, sociology, and philosophy. Overview The basic premise of rational choice theory is that the decisions made by individual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth Shepsle
Kenneth Shepsle (born September 10, 1945) is an American political scientist who is influential for rational choice scholarship. He is George D. Markham professor of government at Harvard University, and a research associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science there. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences. As an undergraduate, he majored in mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States .... His doctorate is from University of Rochester. References Harvard University faculty American political scientists University of Rochester alumni 1945 births Living people Washington University in St. Louis faculty University of North Carolina at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (; born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963, (along with Richard Axel and Alexander Rosenberg), earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the originators of selectorate theory, and was also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy from 2006 to 2016. He was a founding partner at Mesquita & Roundell, until that company merged with his other company, Selectors, LLC, that used the selectorate model for macro-level policy analysis. Now, the company is called Selectors, LLC and uses both the forecasting model and the selectorate approach in consulting. Bueno de Mesquita is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
