ABSTRACT
Because it helps him to achieve these things in elections, wars, and other arenas of political conflict, it is not surprising that the rational actor places a high value on winning. Moreover, as a concept that connotes the means for realizing a whole panoply of ends, the notion of winning offers the political theorist a generalized goal for political actors that conveniently subsumes particular goals which are often difficult to know or specify in actual situations. The consequences that Riker has derived from this postulated goal and other assumptions of his game-theoretic model-in particular, his well-known “size principle” that coalitions tend toward minimal winning size under specified conditions-have served as a powerful stimulus to a growing body of theory that I shall discuss in Chapter 4.
