ABSTRACT
Introduction The individualistic, economic, approach to political behavior developed over the past three decades in public choice theory is based on the idea that political agents, like their economic counterparts, have a limited set of alternatives from which they choose the one most preferred according to their subjective preferences. The heuristic potential of this approach is documented by the impressive growth of interest in, and the soaring number of contributions to, public choice theory. In part, this success is due to extremely simple assumptions about the agents’ preferences-usually derived from presupposing naïve self-interest. Provided the political agents’ constraints can be theoretically reconstructed in a sufficiently realistic way, the simple presupposition allows empirically meaningful hypotheses about what happens in domestic as well as foreign affairs to be derived. An important aspect of individual constraints in the political domain is the fact that in general the interactions are strategic ones. Right from the beginning of public choice theory reference to game-theoretic arguments has therefore been a common stance. However, something that went largely unnoticed in the recourse to game theory was the fact that, in more recent times, game theory turned away the notion of unique strategic equilibria in predicting the outcome of interactions.1
