POLI201 CLASS NOTES8/28/13Principles of Politics-Using these for helping us bring order to our understanding of a complex system.-Goals:-To determine what is, identify facts and patterns about the world around us em-pirically.-Why?, causal theories (we might know who votes but we want to know WHY they vote.)-Assumptions:-Generally true, but maybe not universally true-The Rationality Principle-All people have goals and their political behavior is guided by these goals.-People act instrumentally; the way you act is not going to be randomly deter-mined but it is going to take action because it furthers your goals.-Weigh costs and benefits of actions to make decisions.-This helps us predict human behaviors, as long as we can figure out their goals we can predict how they act.-The Institutions Principle-Institutions are rules and procedures that provide incentive for political behavior, thereby shaping politics.-We want citizens preferences to reflect in our policy outcomes.-Authority-jurisdictions; who has authority over what-agenda power vs. veto power;-agenda power is setting the agenda for what we can be considering at one time, determining which one of these policies is brought up for consideration. veto power refers to after something is put on the agenda, it is the ability to kill the legislation.-decisiveness; -refers to how we actually come to a decision. -delegation; refers to a person having power fundamentally and then giving it away to other people. -not exercising authority directly-principal-agent relationship-Principals need tools to hold agents accountable.-Collective Action Principle-All politics is collection action-action requires cooperation of many different actors with different motivations and pref-erences.-think about all the individuals who have to be on board to pass legislation. -Bargaining is necessary; to compromise or making an exchange, can be formal or infor-mal. Collective Action Problems-Mending the fence outline in textbook-May occur when outcomes are a product of individuals actions, but also other people’s actions. -rational self-interested individuals may produce collectively and individually undesirableoutcomes without coordination.Public Goods- 2 characteristics specifically define public good:- 1. Jointness of supply/non-rivaled consumption: something that doesn’t prevent others from consuming the good.-2. Non-excludability: it is difficult if not impossible to prevent someone from con-suming the good.-examples: air, the quality of air, knowledge, police patrolling, a lighthouse.-There are few “pure” public goods, you have to differentiate between natural and cho-sen public goods.-the primary solution to the underproduction of public goods is the underproduction with-out coercion, this is mutually agreed upon by the public and seen as a good thing to pre-vent “free-riders.”-Solution-coercion, penalties for not cooperating or selective rewards for cooperating. Agree on coercion that the public agrees on to prevent