How is it that people with different and often conflicting interests can band together, overcome coordination problems, and create stable institutions that regulate the interactions among members of the group? Explaining Social Institutions leads us significantly closer to understanding how such institutions come to be.
Much of the work being done under the rubric of "new institutionalism" focuses on how institutions shape social, economic, and political outcomes. This emphasis on influence has provided students of economics, political science, and political economy with...

This book adapts a formal model of elections and legislative politics to study party politics in Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. The approach uses the idea of valence, that is, the party leader's non-policy electoral popularity, and employs survey data to model these elections. The analysis explains why small parties in Israel and Italy keep to the electoral periphery. In the Netherlands, Britain, and the US, the electoral model is extended to include the behavior of activists. In the case of Britain, it is shown that there will be contests between activists...

In this book Itai Sened provides an original analysis of the political institutions that protect property and individual rights. He argues that the origin of these rights resides in political institutions, and not in any set of moral principles. Individual rights are said to derive from a "social contract" that evolves through a political process in which governments grant and protect rights in return for political and economic support.

This book brings an exciting and innovative new approach to the study of politics today. It introduces political bargaining, a process at the heart of all political and economic exchanges in contemporary society and the very essence of politics itself, to provide a new framework and fresh insights to modern political science.

The authors trace the prevalence of bargaining processes in politics from the abstract level of individual human interaction and the state of natureOCO to the more concrete political or institutionalized level.

They introduce students to theory -- the basic models...

This book brings an exciting and innovative new approach to the study of politics today. It introduces political bargaining, a process at the heart of all political and economic exchanges in contemporary society and the very essence of politics itself, to provide a new framework and fresh insights to modern political science. The authors trace the prevalence of bargaining processes in politics from the abstract level of individual human interaction and the 'state of nature' to the more concrete political or institutionalized level. They introduce students to theory -- the basic models of game...

In this book Itai Sened provides an original analysis of the political institutions that protect property and individual rights. He argues that the origin of these rights resides in political institutions, and not in any set of moral principles. Individual rights are said to derive from a "social contract" that evolves through a political process in which governments grant and protect rights in return for political and economic support.

This volume showcases the impact of the work of Douglass C. North, winner of the Nobel Prize and father of the field of new institutional economics. Leading scholars contribute to a substantive discussion that best illustrates the broad reach and depth of Professor North's work. The volume speaks concisely about his legacy across multiple social sciences disciplines, specifically on scholarship pertaining to the understanding of property rights, the institutions that support the system of property rights, and economic growth.