Applications of game theory—and an alternative strategic theory called “theory of moves”—as well as social-choice theory to a wide variety of strategic situations, principally but not exclusively in politics, will be examined. Uses of strategy in voting in committees and elections, in political campaigns, in the defense and deterrence policies of nations, and in bargaining and coalition-buildin...

Most of this course will be devoted to the study of treatment effects in the absence of random assignment of subjects to treatments. As we will see, performing causal inference in the absence of random treatment assignment requires that we make fairly strong assumptions. In contrast, when treatment is assigned randomly, treatment effects can be estimated with very mild assumptions and, very imp...

■ Abstract We review the use of macroeconomics in political science over the past 40 years. The field has been dominated by new classical theory, which leaves little room for economic policy and focuses attention on what democratic governments can do wrong in the short term. The resulting literatures on political business cycles and central bank independence are large and sophisticated, but the...

Three decades ago, at the height of the public controversy over nuclear power, many scientists and engineers were quick to pronounce that the activists who were opposed to this new and supposedly safe and clean form of energy production were acting irrationally. The scientists’ argument—and source of bewilderment— was the fact that while many protesters accepted high risks for themselves, such ...

Many theories in political science predict the spatial clustering of similar behaviors among neighboring units of observation. This spatial autocorrelation poses implications for both inference and modeling that are distinct from the more familiar serial dependence in time series analysis. In this paper, I examine how political scientists can diagnose and model the spatial dependence that is pr...

This article highlights political science’s interest in the distribution of authority between federal and state governments. The authority boundaries are studied (1) as mechanism design problems, where authority is allocated optimally to achieve social goals; (2) as problems in positive political theory, because the authority distribution creates competitive interests; (3) as an institutional d...