George Akerlof, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics argues that: ?Neoclassical theory suggests that poverty is the reflection of low initial endowments of human and nonhuman capital. The theory cannot account for persistent and extreme poverty coupled with high incidence of drug and alcohol abuse, out-of-wedlock births, single-headed households, high welfare dependency, and crime." This book is designed to provide materials for faculty and students who want to explore the basic intellectual history of modern economics and its turn away from rigid rationality assumptions by including material that would be useful in courses and seminars taught in economics departments at all levels, law school courses and seminars. It looks beyond neoclassical theory to provide the following alternatives: An introduction to the major challenges to the neoclassical model from scholars who share a faith in market ordering with overviews of the perspectives of behavioral economics, informational economics, institutional economics, and social norms. An introduction to the major criticisms of neoclassical economics from scholars who reject the model of the market for distributing the basic necessities of life with overviews of the perspectives of humanism; feminist critiques of market theory; racial critiques of market theory; empirical evidence of persistent racial discrimination in major markets; and market socialism.

The first textbook to present a framework of the Behavioral Political Science paradigm for understanding political decision-making.

First Published in 1993. This title sets out to spark debate and learn from the urban bias theory. The author suggests that recent political economy research suggests that it is time to redefine the problem of urban bias. Viewed as a collective engagement with the urban bias theory, this volume presents the new research along with the responses of Bates and Lipton. These studies do not add up to an alternative theory of why the state behaves the way it does towards the countryside. They do, however, point to the factors that need careful attention in future research. These papers can be seen as building blocks for the construction of an alternative theory of 'the state and agriculture'.

Presents a constructively critical reappraisal of the boundaries that define the social scientific analysis of international life.

The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task. This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments. Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.

Experts in anthropology, geography, economics, political science, history, sociology, and language assess the present status of the field of international studies.

This book explores the complex relationship between public health research and policy, employing tobacco control and health inequalities in the UK as contrasting case studies. It argues that focusing on research-informed ideas usefully draws attention to the centrality of values, politics and advocacy for public health debates.

Although the issue of offender decision-making pervades almost every discussion of crime and law enforcement, only a few comprehensive texts cover and integrate information about the role of decision-making in crime. The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making provide high-quality reviews of the main paradigms in offender decision-making, such as rational choice theory and dual-process theory. It contains up-to-date reviews of empirical research on decision-making in a wide range of decision types including not only criminal initiation and desistance, but also choice of locations, times, targets, victims, methods as well as large variety crimes including homicide, robbery, domestic violence, burglary, street crime, sexual crimes, and cybercrime. Lastly, it provides in-depth treatments of the major methods used to study offender decision-making, including experiments, observation studies, surveys, offender interviews, and simulations. Comprehensive and authoritative, the Handbook will quickly become the primary source of theoretical, methodological, and empirical knowledge about decision-making as it relates to criminal behavior.

This book makes the case that several East Central European countries have emerged as fully consolidated democracies. As such, they may be integrated into the mainstream of political science research, and not consigned forever to a transitional category encompassing countries that are now fully democracies as well as some that are not democratic at all. The author outlines the steps of another transition - from post-communist studies to political science research. He demonstrates how institutionalist, or rational choice, theories can be applied to the analysis of political processes in the successfully democratized countries, and proposes a new research agenda for political scientists studying the region. The results of this work can enrich political science as well as our understanding of both democracy and the polities of contemporary Eastern Europe.

This comparative book analyses the development of regional integration parliaments in three different continents of the world. It assesses and compares the expansion and current stage of institutional development of three regional assemblies – the European Parliament, the Pan-African Parliament and the Mercosur Parliament for Latin America. Looking in particular at parliamentary agency, it aims to answer why and to what extent, these regional parliaments have developed differently in terms of their functions and legislative competences? Drawing on new and original empirical data, official documents, and secondary literature, the book focuses on the "critical junctures" in the trajectory of the three assemblies and argues that parliamentary agency has impacted the institutional development of the parliaments leading to diverse paths of regional parliamentarisation. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of global and regional governance, comparative regionalism, European Union studies, legislative studies and more broadly to international relations, history, law, political economy, and international organisations.