Christine Horne : The Rewards of Punishment . A Relational Theory of Norm Enforcement

In her book, Horne develops a theory of norm enforcement. Norms are fundamental to explain social order. Norm enforcement has been studied in many ways in the social sciences. However, Horne adds a truly unique approach. She links norm enforcement with social interdependence by asking how norm enforcement relates to the social relations people have with each other. She defines interdependence as the extent to which people value their relations and the goods they can receive through relations with others. The book claims that the more interdependent people are, the more likely they sanction norm violations. This is similar to Coleman's claim that closed networks are essential for the realization of norms (1990, Chapter 11). Horne discusses norm and meta-norm enforcement, with multiple real world examples, and examines enforcement with laboratory experiments. Before Horne introduces her own theoretical approach to explain norm enforcement she discusses various theoretical approaches, namely the consequen-tialist approach, the shared-meanings approach, and the typicality approach. The consequentialist approach claims that the smaller the costs and the larger the benefits of norm compliance, the more likely people enforce norms. The shared-meanings account merely claims that people agree on a particular behavior that they then all follow. The last approach, the typicality approach, is based on the assumption that individuals imitate the behavior of others due to normative pressure created by the desire to follow the majority. Horne nicely shows the limitations of each of the three approaches with respect to explaining norm and meta-norm enforcement. In order to give a more satisfactory account, Horne develops a relational theory of norm enforcement. The main point of the relational approach is that people not only sanction in response to bad behavior, they also sanction because they care what people think of them. People sanction others because they want to look good to others and not just because of future consequences of others' deviant behavior. The book covers some very important questions related to norm enforcement, and it gives interesting theoretical answers by linking norm enforcement with the relationships among individuals who either do or do not enforce social norms. What makes her approach so