POL SCI 20 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Airline Deregulation, Collective Action, World Politics
Document Summary
Chapter 2 understanding interests, interactions, and institutions outline. Introduction: interests are the fundamental building blocks of politics. Explanations of international political events begin by specifying the relevant actors and their interests: cooperation is a type of interaction involving two or more actions working together to achieve a preferred outcome. That is, if one actor gets more, someone else necessarily gets less. In bargaining, outcomes depend on what will happen in the event that no agreement is reached. Actors derive power from their ability to make the consequences of no agreement less attractive for the other side: institutions are sets of rules. Actors comply with institutions because they facilitate cooperation and lower the cost of joint decision-making in the pursuit of valued goals: institutions also bias policy outcomes. Rules restrain what actors can and cannot do, and thus they make some outcomes more or less likely. Actors struggle over institutions in efforts to bias policy toward outcomes they prefer.
