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Heresthetic is an approach to understanding how political actors manipulate the decision-making process so they can win. [1] Heresthetic is a positive political theory, including aspects of game theory, public choice theory, rational choice theory, and social choice theory to political science. [2] Political scientist William H. Riker is considered the creator and one of the most prominent supports of theory. [3]
Riker argues that herestheticians win because they compel or persuade others to join them in voting or political coalitions. [4] Heresthetic focuses both on the use of rhetoric and political strategy. Riker argues that there are three vital components to heresthetic. [1]
These components allow herestheticians to manipulate political outcomes by structuring debate, rhetorically or structurally, to be more advantageous to their preferred position. [1]
The British Parliament is scheduling upcoming referendum votes to determine Scottish independence from the United Kingdom and if the UK should remain a member of the European Union. A member of parliament who has influence on how the votes will be structured, has a preference that Scotland will remain in union with the UK and that the UK will leave the EU. Scottish independence and the UK remaining a member of the EU is an undesirable outcome for the MP. While polling indicates that a majority of Scottish voters do not support independence, voters are more likely to support independence if the UK leaves the EU. [16] In order to receive his preferred outcome, the MP seeks for the referendum votes to be held in a sequence in which Scottish independence is determined first, and then UK withdrawal from the EU. This voting sequence demonstrates how herestheticians can manipulate the decision-making process so they can win.
Plurality voting refers to electoral systems in which a candidate(s), who poll more than any other counterpart, are elected. In systems based on single-member districts, it elects just one member per district and may also be referred to as first-past-the-post (FPTP), single-member plurality (SMP/SMDP), single-choice voting, simple plurality or relative majority. A system which elects multiple winners elected at once with the plurality rule, such as one based on multi-seat districts, is referred to as plurality block voting.
William Harrison Riker was an American political scientist who is prominent for applying game theory and mathematics to political science. He helped to establish University of Rochester as a center of behavioral revolution in political science.
Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem in social choice theory that states that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting the specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The theorem is often cited in discussions of voting theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem is named after economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his doctoral thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare".
Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.
Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving. As in an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in the public sector, nonprofit and private (corporate) and individual contexts. In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance, and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, justify and be answerable for resulting consequences.
In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.
In social choice theory, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem is a result published independently by philosopher Allan Gibbard in 1973 and economist Mark Satterthwaite in 1975. It deals with deterministic ordinal electoral systems that choose a single winner. It states that for every voting rule, one of the following three things must hold:
Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organization. Policies can assist in both subjective and objective decision making. Policies used in subjective decision-making usually assist senior management with decisions that must be based on the relative merits of a number of factors, and as a result, are often hard to test objectively, e.g. work–life balance policy... Moreover, Governments and other institutions have policies in the form of laws, regulations, procedures, administrative actions, incentives and voluntary practices. Frequently, resource allocations mirror policy decisions.
Agenda setting describes the "ability to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda". The theory suggests that the media has the ability to shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Nations judged to be endowed with more political power receive higher media exposure. The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc. The evolution of agenda-setting and laissez-faire components of communication research encouraged a fast pace growth and expansion of these perspectives. Agenda-setting has phases that need to be in a specific order in order for it to succeed.
The median voter theorem is a proposition relating to ranked preference voting put forward by Duncan Black in 1948. It states that if voters and policies are distributed along a one-dimensional spectrum, with voters ranking alternatives in order of proximity, then any voting method which satisfies the Condorcet criterion will elect the candidate closest to the median voter. In particular, a majority vote between two options will do so.
Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. Whereas choice theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with how to translate the preferences of individuals into the preferences of a group. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Another example is voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences.
In politics, a political agenda is a list of subjects or problems (issues) to which government officials as well as individuals outside the government are paying serious attention to at any given time.
Patrick John Dunleavy, is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and Public Policy within the Government Department of the London School of Economics (LSE). He was also Co-Director of Democratic Audit and Chair of the LSE Public Policy Group. In addition Dunleavy is an ANZSOG Institute for Governance Centenary Chair at the University of Canberra, Australia.
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality.
The international system is for the most part made up by small powers or small states. While a small power in the international system may never equal or surpass the effect of larger powers, they can nevertheless influence the workings of the international system together with others. The formalization of the division between small and great powers came about with the signing of the Treaty of Chaumont in 1814. Before that the assumption had been that all independent states were in theory equal regardless of actual strength and responsibilities.
NOMINATE is a multidimensional scaling application developed by US political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s to analyze preferential and choice data, such as legislative roll-call voting behavior. In its most well-known application, members of the US Congress are placed on a two-dimensional map, with politicians who are ideologically similar being close together. One of these two dimensions corresponds to the familiar left–right political spectrum.
The default effect, a concept within the study of nudge theory, explains the tendency for an agent to generally accept the default option in a strategic interaction. The default option is the course of action that the agent, or chooser, will obtain if he or she does not specify a particular course of action. The default effect has broad applications for firms attempting to 'nudge' their customers in the direction of the firm's optimal outcome. Experiments and observational studies show that making an option a default increases the likelihood that such an option is chosen. There are two broad classes of defaults: mass defaults and personalised defaults. Setting or changing defaults has been proposed and applied by firms as an effective way of influencing behaviour—for example, with respect to setting air-conditioner temperature settings, giving consent to receive e-mail marketing, or automatic subscription renewals.
Policy entrepreneur or entrepreneurs are "individuals who exploit opportunities to influence policy outcomes so as to promote their own goals, without having the resources necessary to achieve this alone. They are not satisfied with merely promoting their self-interests within institutions that others have established; rather, they try to create new horizons of opportunity through innovative ideas and strategies. These persistent individuals employ innovative ideas and nontraditional strategies to promote desired policy outcomes. Whether from the private, public or third sector, one of their defining characteristics is a willingness to invest their own resources – time, energy, reputation and sometimes money – in hope of a future return. While policy entrepreneurs may try to block changes proposed by others, entrepreneurial activities usually seek to change the status quo rather than preserve it. It should be stressed, however, that although the literature has focused mainly on entrepreneurs who have led successful changes in policy, not all policy entrepreneurship ends in success. Finally, policy entrepreneurship is but one form of political participation. It is a process that involves individuals who are willing to take risks, identify policy problems and solutions, and use their political skills and timing to achieve a specified outcome". Most accounts and case studies address these individuals in a national context but the emergence of transnational policy entrepreneurs is increasingly apparent.
Computational social choice is a field at the intersection of social choice theory, theoretical computer science, and the analysis of multi-agent systems. It consists of the analysis of problems arising from the aggregation of preferences of a group of agents from a computational perspective. In particular, computational social choice is concerned with the efficient computation of outcomes of voting rules, with the computational complexity of various forms of manipulation, and issues arising from the problem of representing and eliciting preferences in combinatorial settings.
In social choice theory, the spatial model of voting is used to simulate the behavior of voters in an election, either to explain voter behavior, or to estimate the likelihood of desirable or undesirable outcomes under different voting systems.