Michael Laver

Private Desires, Political Action is an accessible overview of one of the most important approaches to the study of politics in the modern world - rational choice theory. Michael Laver does not set out to review this entire field, but rather to discuss how we might use rational choice theory to analyze the political competition that affects almost every aspect of our lives. The broad-ranging scope of the book introduces the theory at many levels of analysis, including: the private desires of individuals; the social context of how people fulfil their desires; and the problems of collective action. The discussion of these problems extends into the arena of politics, where the activities of `political entrepreneurs′ or politicians and the formation of political parties and coalitions are addressed.

An Invitation to the Politics of Rational Choice

Private Desires, Political Action

Scott de Marchi

This book provides tractable computational analyses of the crucial but complex processes of government formation and survival.

The Governance Cycle in Parliamentary Democracies

Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.

Gift Giving and Diplomacy

The Dutch East India Company in Early Modern Japan

'Private Desires, Political Action' is a masterly & exceptionally clear survey of the fast expanding and notoriously difficult field of rational choice theory.

Social interactions are rich, complex, and dynamic. One way to understand these is to model interactions that fascinate us. Some of the more realistic and powerful models are computer simulations. Simple, elegant and powerful, tools are available in user-friendly free software to help you design, build and run your own models of social interactions that intrigue you, and do this on the most basic laptop computer. Focusing on a well-known model of housing segregation, this Element is about how to unleash that power, setting out the fundamentals of what is now known as 'agent based modeling'.

Fundamentals

Agent-Based Models of Social Life

Michael J. Laver

Kenneth A. Shepsle

Making and Breaking Governments theorizes on how parties create, maintain, or replace new governments.

Michael Laver

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