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Overview
“A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is no other book like it.”
—Norman Schofield, Washington University
“The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a large number of important questions concerning the interaction among voters and elected representatives in the political arena, using a common, rigorous language.”
—Antonio Merlo, University of Pennsylvania
Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure
is the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and David Austen-Smith’s monumental study of the links between individual preferences and collective choice.
The book focuses on representative systems, including both elections and legislative decision-making processes, clearly connecting individual preferences to collective outcomes. This book is not a survey. Rather,
it is the coherent, cumulative result of the authors’
brilliant efforts to indirectly connect preferences to collective choice through strategic behaviors such as agenda-selection and voting.
The book will be an invaluable reference and teaching tool for economists and political scientists, and an essential companion to any scholar interested in the latest theoretical advances in positive political theory.
Synopsis
Along with its predecessor (Positive Political Theory I: Collective Preference, this work is motivated by canonical rational choice theory to develop a rigorous model that can aggregate individual choices in order to positively explain collective societal political behavior. Whereas they dealt with direct preference aggregation in that first volume, here Austen-Smith (political economy, Northwestern U.) and the late Banks (formerly political science, California Institute of Technology) develop an indirect preference aggregation model that they hope can account for "how individual actions are linked, both to individual preferences and to the actions of others" as in "lesser-evil voting," for example. They develop their model for representative systems, described as a two-stage of elections and legislative decision-making. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR