Recently, the call to combine land change science (LCS) and political ecology (PE) in the study of human-environment interactions has been widely discussed by scientists from both subfields of geography. In this paper, we use a hybrid ecology framework to examine the effects of conservation policies on the environment and the livelihood of the people of the Korup National Park (KNP). Using tech...

Economists have heralded the formulation of the expected utility theorem as a universal method of choice under uncertainty. In their seminal paper, Stigler and Becker (Stigler & Becker, 1977) declared that “human behavior can be explained by a generalized calculus of utility-maximizing behavior” (p.76). The universality of the rational choice theory has been widely criticized by psychologists, ...

In previous chapters, we discussed the contextual factors that affect the development of political systems. However, the evolution of political systems is not merely a function of the economic, social, cultural, and international environments. Political democracy is also as much a product of human choices as it is a product of context, particularly the choice of institutions that help shape the...

Introduction In a recent essay Christiano (2004) coined a distinction between 'mainstream' and 'revisionist' rational choice political theory, and cast us in the role of revisionist theorists 1. While we disagree with some aspects of Christiano's argument 2 , we broadly accept our designated role as revisionist public choice theorists. The major purposes of this brief paper are to provide a sum...

Krasno and Green have argued that political advertising has no impact on voter turnout. We remain unconvinced by their evidence, given concerns about how they measure the advertising environment, how they measure advertising tone, their choice of modeling techniques and the generalizability of their findings. These differences aside, we strongly agree that political advertising does little to u...

This paper will examine the influence of radio political campaign messages on the electorates’ voting behavior in Kano – Nigeria, with a focus on the 2015 general elections. It seeks to ascertain the extent that the electorates in Kano – Nigeria were exposed to radio political campaign messages, as well as the extent to which such messages influenced their voting decisions. Equally, the study c...

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorant about political issues, because the costs of being informed greatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. The costs of information (supply side) as well as the utility of information (demand side), however, can vary substantially depending on the political system under which citizens live. Using survey data from the European Un...

Much of what we recognize as political is a function of choice. Political phenomena such as elections, wars, legislation, and protests occur because people choose to take particular actions at particular times. For scholars, the concept of choice is important because it primes us to consider not just the existence of an action, but also the volition that produced it. Such priming of volition is...