Game-Theoretic Approaches in Political Science

Abstract

Politics include a plethora of situations in which individual or collective actors have to make decisions. In electoral campaigns, parties decide about the platforms they offer. Later, in elections, citizens make a choice whether or not to vote, and if yes, for which party or candidate. If elections do not produce single party majorities, parties again have to decide – now about which other party or parties to form a government with. This list could be continued by legislative decisions, collective decision making in courts, choices of lobbies’ strategies, and much more. It is, thus, not surprising that the analysis of public choice is an important and growing field in political science. The Rational Choice School argues that actors individually estimate the consequences of different alternatives and choose those which maximize their expected utilities. While other scholars doubt that political actors behave that way, it is broadly agreed that decision-theoretic and game-theoretic analyses at least help to find out whether or not actors decide rationally and what (else) motivates their actions. Those analyses are therefore highly important to understand political actors and processes. This panel welcomes all kinds of decision-theoretically or game-theoretically oriented papers. Theoretical, methodological and conceptual papers can be submitted as well as simulation studies, results of laboratory experiments and empirical studies.