[POLSCI 1G06] - Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam (78 pages long!)
29 Nov 2016
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According to one textbook (dickerson and flanagan), government has to do with compulsion, not voluntary decision making. Government is a specialized activity of those individuals that make and enforce public decisions that are binding upon the whole community (p4) . Government, then, is the institutional apparatus that makes and enforces rules on society. But note the bolded terms: government seems very top-down according to this definition. One (possible) way of answering this question is by applying game. Game theory is a way of modelling and predicting how human beings will interact given specific circumstances and assumptions. Prisoners dilemma (one type of game scenario) asks the question of how individuals are likely to act (given specific assumptions about individual rationality: in an environment where there is no authority in place to enforce agreements. The result of the game: people behaving rationally on an individual level can generate outcomes that are irrational (typically 4 results)
