This review of William Riker's work suggests that his interest in rational choice theory was based on his desire to understand profound constitutional transformation in U.S. political history. Although he argued that "anything can happen in politics," his use of the notion of heresthetic allowed...

For over forty years, Douglass North has sought in his work to determine those conditions that favor economic growth. In his most recent writings he has emphasized the institutional innovations of the state and how these are often preceded, or accompanied, by transformations in beliefs and...

Suppose p is a smooth preference profile (for a society, N) belonging to a domain PN. Let be a voting rule, and (p)(x) be the set of alternatives in the space, W, which is preferred to x. The equilibrium E((p)) is the set {x∈W:(p)(x) is empty}. A sufficient condition for existence of E((p))...

Mancur Olson's book, The Rise and Decline of Nations [45], used ideas from his earlier Logic of Collective Action [44] to argue that entrenched interest groups in a polity could induce economic sclerosis, or slow growth. These ideas seemed relevant to the perceived relative decline of the U.S....

In his book on Liberalism against Populism, William Riker argued that Lincoln's success in the 1860 election was the culmination of a long progression of strategic attempts by the Whig coalition of commercial interests to defeat the `Jeffersonian-Jacksonian' Democratic coalition of agrarian...

Olson has argued that rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common goal or to satisfy their collective interests. Hardin interpreted the argument in terms of the classical prisoner's dilemma and offered a solution whereby the majority choice of the group would...