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This book answers the question of whether we can apply evolutionary theories to our understanding of the development of social structures. Social networks have increasingly become the focus of many social scientists as a way of analyzing these social structures. While many powerful network analytic tools have been developed and applied to a wide range of empirical phenomena, understanding the evolution of social organization still requires theories and analyses of social network evolutionary processes. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have combined their efforts in what is an indication of some very promising future research and the work represented in this volume provides a basis for a sustained analysis of the evolution of social life.
Preferences and Procedures presents and tests game-theoretic models of European Union legislative decision-making. It is inspired by the idea of linking statistical testing strategies firmly to formal models of EU policymaking. After describing salient features of the EU legislative process and comparing different models of how the EU negotiates new legislative measures, the models' predictive power is evaluated. On a more general level, Preferences and Procedures answers questions regarding the empirically recognizable effects of institutional arrangements on joint bargaining outcomes.
The EU's perceived lack of responsiveness to ordinary citizens has created a serious crisis of democratic legitimacy that threatens its very survival. In this timely book, Schneider presents a comprehensive account of how EU governments signal responsiveness to the interests of their citizens over European policies.
How does the EU resolve controversy when making laws that affect citizens? How has the EU been affected by the recent enlargements that brought its membership to a diverse group of twenty-seven countries? This book answers these questions with analyses of the EU's legislative system that include the roles played by the European Commission, European Parliament and member states' national governments in the Council of Ministers. Robert Thomson examines more than 300 controversial issues in the EU from the past decade and describes many cases of controversial decision-making as well as rigorous comparative analyses. The analyses test competing expectations regarding key aspects of the political system, including the policy demands made by different institutions and member states, the distributions of power among the institutions and member states, and the contents of decision outcomes. These analyses are also highly relevant to the EU's democratic deficit and various reform proposals.
The Handbook of Rational Choice Social Research offers the first comprehensive overview of how the rational choice paradigm can inform empirical research within the social sciences. This landmark collection highlights successful empirical applications across a broad array of disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, history, and psychology. Taking on issues ranging from financial markets and terrorism to immigration, race relations, and emotions, and a huge variety of other phenomena, rational choice proves a useful tool for theory- driven social research. Each chapter uses a rational choice framework to elaborate on testable hypotheses and then apply this to empirical research, including experimental research, survey studies, ethnographies, and historical investigations. Useful to students and scholars across the social sciences, this handbook will reinvigorate discussions about the utility and versatility of the rational choice approach, its key assumptions, and tools.
The Council of Ministers is one of the most powerful institutions of the European Union (EU) and plays a major role in the European policy-making process. Drawing on formal theory and combining quantitative and qualitative methods in an innovative fashion, this book provides novel insights into the role of national bureaucrats in legislative decision-making of the Council of the EU. The book examines and describes the Council of Ministers' committee system and its internal decision-making process. Relying on a wide quantitative dataset as well as six detailed case studies in the policy areas of Agriculture, Environment, and Taxation, it provides a comprehensive and systematic assessment of t...
This pathbreaking book illuminates the politics of issue resolution within the European community by evaluating and comparing competing models of decision making across twenty-two policy issues. Written by American and Dutch scholars in the field, the book will be of great interest to students of comparative politics, public policy analysts, mathematic modelers, and all those concerned with the development of the European Community. Contributors: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Samuel Eldersveld, Jacek Kugler, A. F. K. Organski, Roy Pierce, Frans N. Stokman, Jan M. M. Van den Bos, Reinier Van Costen, John H. P. Williams
The purpose of this book is neither to duplicate overviews of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) nor to recapitulate narrative treatments of the European integration process. The aim is to comprehend how EU negotiations work theoretically and empirically so that a conceptual framework for analyzing EU international negotiations will be provided and juxtaposed to two key negotiations leading to the establishment of the CFP.
This book explores the interplay between formal rules and real world differences, questioning to what extent size-related capacities between states matters for the dynamics and outcomes of negotiations taking place in the United Nations General Assembly, an institution that strongly reflects the one-state, one-vote principle.