Answer:
Five Principles of Politics
What is the underlying logic of political behavior, collective action, and institutional politics? What are the five principles of politics that will be used to guide analysis throughout this textbook?
The Rationality Principle holds that all political behavior has a purpose and that people tend to be goal-oriented in their political activities as they make instrumental choices about how to act.
The Institution Principle recognizes that political institutions provide incentives for political behavior, thereby shaping and structuring politics. Institutional rules and procedures—like jurisdiction (who has the authority to apply rules or make decisions), agenda power (who determines what issues will be taken up), veto power (the ability to defeat something even if it is on the agenda), decisiveness (the rules by which authoritative and final determinations are made), and delegation (the transmission of authority to some other official or body, which is characterized by a principal-agent relationship involving transaction costs)—are consequential for political outcomes.
The Collective-Action Principle refers to the idea that, although all politics is collective action, getting people to act in concert is difficult. Thus, political action often involves both formal and informal bargaining, along with other efforts to overcome the obstacles to collective action. Formal and informal bargaining relationships are struck in politics to provide for collective decision making, and organizational efforts to overcome the tendencies of individuals to “free ride” on the labors of others are necessary to overcome the collective-action problems endemic in producing public goods. One common solution to the collective-action problem, arising from Mancur Olson’s by-product theory, is the provision of selective benefits that accrue only to those who contribute to the group enterprise.
The Policy Principle holds that political outcomes are the products of individual preferences and institutional procedures. Combining lessons from the Rationality and Institution principles, we see that individual political actors’ personal, electoral, and institutional ambitions are filtered through, and in many ways shaped by, institutional arrangements in politics; and that policy outcomes are the products of the complex intermingling of individual goals and institutions.
The History Principle reminds us that how we got here matters. Political circumstances and outcomes are understood to be path dependent (partly determined by past events and choices) and to influence existing rules and procedures, political loyalties and alliances, and political viewpoints and perspectives.
