Normative Judgment, Realism, and International Law

A strand of thought within international relations realism claims that international law, understood as the dense network of multilateral and bilateral treaties, customary law, and institutions tasked with interpreting and applying them, cannot have meaningfully legal authority. This chapter traces the genealogy of the realist take on international law to a problematic use of the rational choice model for state behavior. Namely, realists derive skeptical positions about the authority and value of international law by using the rational choice model applied to states prescriptively rather than merely descriptively. With parsimonious assumptions about instrumental rationality, preferences, and choice situations, realists have put the model to good use to explain state action in the context of international politics. But they go much further, by taking the rational actor model to articulate an implicit moral ideal for states.

Populism and the rational choice model: The case of the French National Front

This article proposes a general model of partisan political dealignment based on the theory of expressive voting. It is based on the Riker and Odershook equation. Voters cast a ballot for a political party if the utility associated with expressing their support for it is more than their expressive costs. Expressive utility is modeled here as a certain utility model. Then, the model is applied to the rise of voting support in favor of French right-wing populists, the National Front (FN). We show that the fall of justification costs of FN ideology along with the decline in stigmatization costs of voting in favor of the extreme right has fostered the popularity of this party. Political dealignment here is only a particular case of a general process of political norms transgression inherited by each voter.

Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Voting Behaviour: A Comparative Analysis

The study of voting behavior is a sub-field of Political Science. Voting represents an important aspect of public participation in a democratic system. Keeping in view the importance of voting behavior in a democratic dispensation, social scientists have paid much attention to its determinants. At least three kinds of theoretical models can be discerned in the works of social scientists: a sociological model, a psycho-social model, and a rational choice model. The focus of the sociological model is on social factors, the psychosocial model focuses on psychological or political factors, while the rational choice model emphasizes economic factors. The main aim of the paper is to present a brief overview of these three kinds of models comparatively.

A Rational-Choice Model of Covid-19 Transmission with Endogenous Quarantining and Two-sided Prevention

This paper offers a parsimonious, rational-choice model to study the effect of pre-existing inequalities on the transmission of COVID-19. Agents decide whether to "go out" (or self-quarantine) and, if so, whether to wear protection such as masks. Three elements distinguish the model from existing work. First, non-symptomatic agents do not know if they are infected. Second, some of these agents unknowingly transmit infections. Third, we permit two-sided prevention via the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions: the probability of a person catching the virus from another depends on protection choices made by each. We find that a mean-preserving increase in pre-existing income inequality unambiguously increases the equilibrium proportion of unprotected, socializing agents and may increase or decrease the proportion who self-quarantine. Strikingly, while higher pre-COVID inequality may or may not raise the overall risk of infection, it increases the risk of disease in social interactions.

The Psychology of the Main Social Groups

This chapter suggests that some of the perverse features of préséance can be understood in a certain perspective. It explains that when the rational-choice model fails, it is either because of indeterminacy or of irrationality. It confirms that indeterminacy arises largely because of uncertainty. The chapter considers the mental precursors and causes of action, such as motivations and beliefs, of the main categories of agents in the ancien régime. It mentions Jean Egret, who emphasized that the major criticism the parlements made of the administrative monarchy was that under the name of the intendant one had established the anonymous despotism of the clerks.

The role of Sociology in the promotion of actions aimed at social innovation in the Mediterranean area

The change in contexts and their complexity, especially in the Mediterranean area, has raised the need to start reflecting on modernizing innovative actions able to provide social responses to the real needs of citizens and, moreover, able to combine resources and quality. This is necessary since the expansion of rights is associated with a decreasing public funding capacity. The future challenge will surely be a retrenchment in public spending, orienting it towards the threefold structure of choice (need, preferences, goods) and overcoming of rational choice model (preferences, goods). In a context characterized by these features, the sociological knowledge becomes paramount for reading social phenomena. The role of sociology is to produce “knowledge” through which society can observe the occurring phenomena recognizing their problems, thus allowing for a continuous, ongoing improvement.

Who Is Homo Oeconomicus?

The paper traces the historical roots of the concept “economic man”, and reveals the main methodological characteristics of the rational choice model, which traditionally constituted the “hard core” of the economic approach to human behavior. The phrase Homo oeconomicus was coined in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century by critics of political economy in order to fix at the terminological level the apparent unrealisticness of the ideas the latter had developed about human being and human behavior. However, economists quickly appropriated this concept, making it neutral and starting to use it for their own analytical purposes. At the same time, they understood from the very beginning that it was nothing more than an abstract conceptual scheme, incapable of claiming descriptive realism. Accordingly, its criticism by sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists most often turned out to be untenable due to their erroneous confusion of the concepts of “analytical construct” and “anthropological type”. Next, the paper highlights the transformation of modern economics from a mono-paradigmatic into a multi-paradigmatic discipline, and the emergence within it of numerous competing models of man. In this context, several incarnations of Homo oeconomicus are discussed: the traditional (“narrow”) version; the extended (Beckerian) version; behavioral economics; neuroeconomics; and genoeconomics. The paper also provides a comparative analysis of different perceptions of man intrinsic to economics and sister social sciences. The author concludes that, in its modified and truncated form, the conventional Homo oeconomicus remains a reference point even for the latest studies in economics and psychology, where it is subject to various deconstructions.

TWO ACCOUNTS OF THE RELATION BETWEEN POLITICAL ECONOMY AND ECONOMICS (AND WHY IT MATTERS WHICH ACCOUNT IS BETTER)

In a providential account of the changing relation between political economy and economics, the late nineteenth-century development of economics is identified with the rational choice model; and the revival of political economy in the late twentieth century comes with the export of this model to politics and the other social sciences. An alternative prudential account locates the revival of political economy with a significant qualification to the rational choice model. This qualification restores an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century view of rule-following to human agency. This essay sets out these accounts and draws the conclusion that the choice of one over the other matters, not least for the practice of contemporary politics.