POLI 441 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Collective Action, Hegemony, Path Dependence
26 May 2016
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Document Summary
Terms of trade prisoner"s dilemma - fear of exploitation by trading partners. Domestic politics - governments pandering to domestic interest groups with vested interests: protection for sale. We are trying to provide some sort of a public good, and yet we all have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others, so the good gets underprovided. The same concept that kindleberger used to explain the need for a hegemon explains the power of interest groups. One powerful being will provide the public good at their expense because it cares more. In this case, the interest groups we care about are import competing groups. The patterns of distributional effects is the same for much of political reform. The few losers are concentrated - the losers tend to lose a lot, their livelihood. If you add the winners up, their gains are larger than the losers, but to the losers that is little solace.
