The standard approach in positive political theory posits that action choices are the consequences of preferences. Social psychology—in particular, cognitive dissonance theory—suggests the opposite: preferences may themselves be affected by action choices. We present a formal framework that applies this idea to three models of political choice: (1) one in which partisanship emerges naturally in...

The SAGE Library of Political Science collects together the articles that have been most influential in shaping the discipline. Each multi-volume set presents a collection of field-defining published works, both classical and contemporary, sourced from the foremost publications in the discipline by an internationally renowned editor or editorial team. They also include a full introduction, pres...

American politics has become more polarized. The source of the phenomena is debated. We posit that human mate choice may play a role in the process. Spouses are highly correlated in their political preferences, and research in behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology shows that political preferences develop through a complex interaction of social upbringing, life experience, immedia...

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality. One may speak of grand campaign strategy, rationally formulated and executed with precision, but a great deal of campai...

Economic regulation is characterized as (1) an effort by special interests to influence the allocation of property rights, in (2) a continuous path-dependent spontaneous evolution (as apposed to a static equilibrium), driven by (3) market, political, and bureaucratic entrepreneurship in an ongoing discovery process. The implications of the model are illustrated by an examination of the evolutio...

The notion of stewardship, drawn from the literature of management and organization in the United States, may offer a useful window into this broader understanding of governance. Stewardship depends on a willingness to be accountable for results without using control as the means to reach them. This demands a choice for service with partnership and empowerment as basic governance strategies. St...

The extended editorial provides a general introduction to the individual contributions to this Special Issue on ‘Choice in language education’. Together with the concluding piece by Lid King, it frames the various cases presented, and offers a discussion of the broader socio-political, cultural, economic and conceptual context within which they are located and against which they can be read. It...

This paper analyzes governance choice in a two-level federation in providing road infrastructure across jurisdictions. Two models are proposed to predict the choice of centralized or decentralized spending structure on a serial road network shared by two districts. While the first model considers simple Pigouvian behavior of governments, the second explicitly models political forces at both a l...

Today, the role of government is considered so much precise regulations, foresight and initiative of the public sector in the economy can trigger market growth. But usually because the private sector activity is affected by interactions of the market and government, markets' development process is slow and governmental clubs have become a consumer of financial resources by their inefficient fun...