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This paper, which was originally published in the journal Comparative Political Studies in 1999, is the second of two that elaborate a relatively general approach to judicial politics, which emphasizes the underlying social logics not just of law and courts but also of politics and government. The triad – two contracting parties and a dispute resolver – constitutes a primal social institution, a microcosm of governance, so in uncovering the institutional dynamics of the triad an essential logic of government itself is also uncovered; the objectives of this paper are to defend the validity of these contentions and to demonstrate their centrality to the discipline. After introducing the key concepts of dyad, triad, and normative structure, a model is presented of a particular mode of governance, i.e. the social mechanism by which the rules in place in any given community are adapted to the experiences and exigencies of those who live under them. The theory integrates, as interdependent factors, the evolution of strategic (utility-maximizing) behaviour and normative (cultural or rule-based) structure, and captures dynamics of change observable at both the micro level (the behaviour of individual actors), and the macro level (the institutional environment, or social structure, in which this behaviour takes place); the mechanisms of change that are endogenous to the model are specified, and the conditions under which these mechanisms would be expected to operate, and fail to operate, are identified. The model is then used to explain two hard cases of systemic change: the international trade regime, established by the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); and the French Fifth Republic, founded in 1958; the conclusion draws out some of the implications of the analysis for understanding of the complex relationship between strategic behaviour and social structure.

The regular and effective settlement of disputes by a third‐party dispute resolver leads to the evolution of a set of behavioural norms, which become authoritative in society. In turn, normative evolution shapes how interests are formed and power operates. In the context of constitutional law and politics, this system of reciprocal influence has led to the judicialization of European politics and the constitutionalization of European law. The final section of this chapter surveys a variety of perspectives on European constitutional politics, including a principal‐agent framework, the legislative politics approach, judicial decision‐making and conceptualizing legal normative autonomy.

An international conference was held in London in April 2006 to examine the different dimensions of the emerging political and security relationship between the EU and China. Organized jointly by a British and a Chinese partner under the guidance of the British Academy's International Relations Department, the conference brought together European, Chinese and international academics, analysts and policymakers. The papers in this volume reflect the diverse discussions at the conference. The first section of this book addresses the important question of strategic identities and behaviour. From considerations of grand strategy, the second section turns to the role of society and governments in the European–Chinese relationship. The third section discusses attempts to approach this question by examining problems and prospects for European–Chinese engagement in regional and global governance. The final section presents different longer-term perspectives on EU–China relations.

This chapter explores the outworkings of geography and administrative complexity on Habsburg conceptions of military force and political power more broadly. The Habsburg Monarchy’s physical and political geography shaped how its leaders thought about war. Austria’s position at the heart of Europe dictated that it would be a continental power and thus need large land armies to achieve security. But encirclement by powerful rivals meant that Austria could not defend all of its frontiers simultaneously using military force alone. Internal complexities placed further limitations on the size and capabilities of Habsburg armies, curtailing their utility as offensive instruments. Together, these constraints influenced Habsburg strategic behavior by encouraging the development of defensive conceptions of force that sought to avoid risk when possible, highlighting gaps that would need to be filled to augment the monarchy’s weak military capabilities, and prompting the systematic development of strategy as a tool for coping with Austria’s difficult environment, with a particular emphasis on managing the time parameters of competition and avoiding the full impact of the virtually limitless threats facing the monarchy.

Through their legally based mechanisms for settling various disputes, trade agreements play no small part in affecting corporate strategic behaviour. NAFTA, because of its provisions, has been able to improve in terms of dispute settlements, since foreign nationals and corporations are enabled to act against government measures for breach of treaty obligation. It is important to note that NAAEC's Articles 14–15 have also allowed firms to correspondingly act over the failure of the government to implement the said regulations. Trade agreements are also capable of avoiding and preventing disputes since these entail institutions and rules for environmental regulation application, the operations of regulatory systems, and establishing the content of the regulations. Companies may be provided with knowledge, not only about foreign regulations, but about how these foreign systems work as well.

This chapter focuses on nongovernmental organizations' (NGOs') moral capital, empowerment, and strategic behavior. Moral capital can facilitate spatial and territorial strategizing in as much as it can help locate and retain partners at a local level. While the moral vision and mission of NGOs is often linked to promoting social justice, this agenda never guarantees the support of local residents in areas where organizations wish to work. Moral capital can serve as an antidote to the skepticism and distrust that often confronts NGOs in these situations. How the sensitivity, strategic rationality, and moral capital become intertwined is revealed when NGOs pursue multifaceted action. There is a tendency to promote area-based reputations with attendant spatial economies of scale, often facilitating the acquisition of moral capital.

This chapter discusses work on self-control in a trio of fields: philosophy, psychiatry, and social psychology. Topics include the range of behavior to which self-control is relevant, theoretical issues surrounding a strategy for self-control of potential use to addicts, the utility of implementation intentions for purposes of self-control, and an energy model of self-control. Work by psychiatrist George Ainslie and social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Peter Gollwitzer is discussed. The chapter takes up the question whether agents who fail to make a successful effort of self-control in the service of their conscious better judgments could ever have done otherwise, and it argues for an affirmative answer.

This chapter reports a global view of affective politics from the perspective of game theory. Many game-theoretic efforts in political science are criticized for the minimal way in which they represent how people think, as well as their psychological inadequacy. Research concerning emotion conducted over the course of the past decade reinforces the idea that emotions are necessary for goal-oriented behavior. In the Sanfey research agenda, the empirical study of emotions and a game-theoretic representation of a social situation combine to provide superior insights into the relation between emotion and strategic behavior. Emotions play a significant role in the outcome of political processes. A game-theoretic approach can clarify the conditions under which politicians should seek to evoke fear among voters and the conditions under which people will respond to emotional appeals.

In this concluding perspectives essay, Benton counsels against the search for historical actors’ “understanding,” what they thought or knew about law. She warns that inadequate sources make difficult the recovery of what Natives and settlers believed about law, a problem compounded by their tactical use of “feigned mastery” and “studied ignorance.” Rather than seek the largely unrecoverable “understanding” of historical actors, scholars should instead reconstruct strategic behavior. Understanding, she concludes, was not a precondition to “intelligibility-through-practice,” which arose through negotiations and conflicts over such matters as jurisdiction and protection.

This chapter considers the tendencies for individual decision makers to perform nonoptimally when faced with a choice between purchasing a good/service immediately, versus waiting to purchase at a lower cost but potentially higher risk. The challenge of effective dynamic pricing by sellers is also addressed. The Wait or Buy game introduces strategic consumer behavior in the dynamic pricing and revenue management context. In the three versions of the game students act either as buyers who decide to buy now or wait for a lower price, or as sellers who decide on how much inventory to allocate to discounted price sales. They compete against computerized sellers or buyers, respectively, or against each other. The game has been taught many times in a business school classroom as an effective tool to study behavioral issues in dynamic pricing and revenue management.

This chapter discusses and analyzes approval voting, one of the point-summing methods where each voter is allowed to cast as many votes as he wishes. The form in which approval voting is practiced currently is an example of range-voting, in which there are only two meaningless scores. The approval voting experiments conducted under the conditions of the Orsay experiment of 2007 demonstrates support to the theoretical claims for and against it. The concept of approval judgment, which differs from approval voting in its traditional practice, which makes clear that the evaluations are absolute grades, is also discussed. One of the drawbacks of approval voting is that a candidate preferred by only one voter of the electorate is likely to be elected when strategic behavior is ignored.

This concluding chapter evaluates the contributions of the strategic behavior model of black elite activism in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena. As this book illustrates, black leaders often take policy positions that stand in opposition to the goals that the governments of their ancestral homeland pursue in U.S. foreign policy. The chapter argues that the two-level games metaphor at the heart of the strategic behavior model sheds light on the behavior of the black elite in the U.S. foreign policymaking arena because it is clear that black leaders jealously guard their interests and those of their constituents in the domestic arena. This model, in addition, has broad applicability to other racial and ethnic groups. Finally, the chapter shows how this alternative theory also helps to resolve recent intellectual debates about the impact of transnationalism on U.S. foreign policy and the quality of black representation in U.S. politics.

It develops a simple theory of Cournot strategic interactions between firms as basic framework and discusses behaviour of firms from dimensions of market structure, technology, scale economies, and value-chains (subcontracting). It demonstrates how large firms derived monopoly power in the product markets and monopsony power in the input markets. This, in turn, made them inward oriented in search of monopoly power in the Pre-reforms era. On the other hand, small and medium scale firms faced highly competitive conditions and high transactions costs in the domestic markets especially in the sub-contracting linkages with large firms. This, in turn, drove relatively efficient small and medium firms to exports where they are price takers facing lesser degree of transaction costs. The chapter also traces how exporting small and medium firms realized efficiency in production processes.

This chapter describes how politicians have manipulated the elements of electoral systems to show that many properties of methods of social choice and voting are real and can have practical consequences on the parts of candidates and voters. Several voting mechanisms used in practice in several countries, including the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, and France, are also discussed. By practice, it is shown that both the politicians and the voters are engaged in strategic behavior, which must be taken into account when the analysis of electoral systems worldwide is performed.

This chapter introduces the ‘eventful sociology’ that characterizes the emergence of protest episodes in the four North African countries. Events are non-routine sequences of actions that reshape the routine forms of governance (and opposition) structuring everyday social and political life. Transformative events initiate a transformation of behaviors that is both strategic and reactive, and that reshapes social and political life first at the local level. This chapter qualifies the emergence of new causal processes and how they interact with preexisting practices of governance. The narrative places side by side the views and strategies of different pro- and anti-regime actors in the face of unexpected events and their consequences. The chapter outlines how sequences of events produced new practices, arenas and actors of contestations, often as unintended consequences of interactions. This event-centric account of protest episodes highlights the transformative role of protest in the construction of newly effective forms of political behaviors.