Jeffrey S. Banks - Böcker

“A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is noother book like it.”—Norman Schofield, Washington University“The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a largenumber of important questions concerning theinteraction among voters and elected representativesin the political arena, using a common, rigorouslanguage.”—Antonio Merlo, University of PennsylvaniaPositive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structureis the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and DavidAusten-Smith’s monumental study of the linksbetween individual preferences and collective choice.The book focuses on representative systems, includingboth elections and legislative decision-makingprocesses, clearly connecting individual preferences tocollective outcomes. This book is not a survey. Rather,it is the coherent, cumulative result of the authors’brilliant efforts to indirectly connect preferences tocollective choice through strategic behaviors such asagenda-selection and voting.The book will be an invaluable reference and teachingtool for economists and political scientists, and anessential companion to any scholar interested in thelatest theoretical advances in positive political theory.

Positive Political Theory I is concerned with the formal theory of preference aggregation for collective choice. The theory is developed as generally as possible, covering classes of aggregation methods that include such well-known examples as majority and unanimity rule and focusing in particular on the extent to which any aggregation method is assured to yield a set of "best" alternatives. The book is intended both as a contribution to the theory of collective choice and a pedagogic tool.Austen-Smith and Banks have made the exposition both rigorous and accessible to people with some technical background (e.g., a course in multivariate calculus). The intended readership ranges from more technically-oriented graduate students and specialists to those students in economics and political science interested less in the technical aspects of the results than in the depth, scope, and importance of the theoretical advances in positive political theory."This is a stunning book. Austen-Smith and Banks have a deep understanding of the material, and their text gives a powerfully unified and coherent perspective on a vast literature. The exposition is clear-eyed and efficient but never humdrum. Even those familiar with the subject will find trenchant remarks and fresh insights every few pages. Anyone with an interest in contemporary liberal democratic theory will want this book on the shelf." --Christopher Achen, University of MichiganDavid Austen-Smith is Professor of Political Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Management and Strategy, Northwestern University. Jeffrey S. Banks is Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology.

Political economy has been an essential realm of inquiry and has attracted myriad intellectual adherents for much of the period of modern scholarship. The discipline's formal split into the distinct studies of political science and economics in the nineteenth-century, while advantageous for certain scientific developments, has biased the way economists and political scientists think about many issues, and has placed artificial constraints on the study of many important social issues. This volume calls for a reaffirmation of the importance of the unified study of political economy, and explores the frontiers of the interaction between politics and markets. This volume brings together intellectual leaders of various areas, drawing upon state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical analysis from each of the underlying disciplines. Each chapter, while beginning with a survey of existing work, focuses on profitable lines of inquiry for future developments. Particular attention is devoted to fields of active current development.