Self-interested Actors Research Articles

Life-Suspending Technologies, Cryonics, and Catastrophic Risks

I defend the claim that life-suspending technologies can constitute a catastrophic and existential security factor for risks structurally similar to those related to climate change. The gist of the argument is that, under certain conditions, life-suspending technologies such as cryonics can provide self-interested actors with incentives to efficiently tackle such risks—in particular, they provide reasons to overcome certain manifestations of generational egoism, a risk factor of several catastrophic and existential risks. Provided we have reasons to decrease catastrophic and existential risks such as climate change, we also have a (defeasible) reason for investing in developing and making life-suspending technologies (more) widespread.

Investigating stakeholder rationales for participating in collaborative interactions at the policy–science nexus

Contemporary politics has become increasingly reliant on scientific knowledge. In evidence-based policymaking, science is invoked to address complex, ‘wicked’ problems. Yet, policymakers do not necessarily base decisions on the best-available evidence, and models of knowledge used in policymaking have long been criticised as simplistic. Therefore, collaboration with non-scientific actors has emerged as a possible way forward. On both sides of the policy–science nexus, collaborative interactions are extended to include ‘stakeholders’ to improve the impact of knowledge (that is, its usability and applicability). And while stakeholder involvement often follows this overarching justification, the question of stakeholder rationales for participating in these processes has previously received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, this article analyses stakeholder rationales, asking why organisations get involved in collaborative research. The theoretical expectations about divergent organisational rationales, drawing on theories of institutional and organisational logics, are investigated through an exploratory case study of stakeholders engaged in collaborative research projects in Norway. The theoretical and empirical analysis form the basis for a proposed new typology of stakeholder rationales. In this way, the article contributes towards the development of better tools for understanding and assessing the sources and potential pathways of knowledge, shaped by self-interested actors, making its way into policymaking processes, often as ‘neutral’ evidence.

Empire's Embezzlers: Fraud and Scandal in U.S.-Occupied Cuba, 1900–1902

AbstractIn 1900, news of U.S. postal officials committing fraud in Cuba became a scandal that influenced the political, legal, and governmental trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialist Democrats used the frauds to undermine Republican pro-imperialists on the eve of the 1900 election. Prominent Republicans hoped to contain the scandal through swift punishment, but when the accused refused extradition, the resulting Supreme Court case, though rarely discussed, became the first of the Insular Cases. In 1900, it was not yet clear whether the U.S. empire would be run by self-interested actors or self-proclaimed progressive reformers. The commitment to progressive imperialism observed later in other colonies was, at least in part, worked out in this postal frauds case, as individuals chose how to respond to the scandal. Their actions were guided as much by scandal and the pursuit of self-interest as they were by lofty ideals about good government.

Experiments on norm focusing and losses in dictator games.

We conducted experiments on norm focusing. The tests were carried out with two versions of dictator games: in one version of the game, the dictator had to allocate a gain of €10, while in the other version, a loss of €−10 needs to be allocated. In a first treatment, we focused subjects on the average giving in similar previous dictator games. The second treatment focused subjects on the behaviour of what a self-interested actor should do. In total, N = 550 participants took part in our experiments. We found (1) a significant difference in giving behaviour between gain and loss treatments, with subjects being moderately more self-interested in the loss domain, (2) a significant effect of focusing subjects on the average behaviour of others, but (3) no effect of focusing subjects on the behaviour of self-interested actors.

Negotiations in the Council of the EU under a new institutional setting: the case of the asylum policy

ABSTRACT This study aims to explain how changes in the institutional setting influenced and shaped member states’ capabilities and negotiation behaviour in the Council of the EU, focusing on the asylum policy. By combining the actor-centred institutionalism framework with the literature on EU decision-making, bargaining, and Europeanisation, it argues that the observed ‘mixed-motive game’ in the Council can be explained by the interrelation and interaction of five factors: issue-salience, voting rule, consensus norm, the ordinary legislative procedure, and the type of legal instrument. Negotiations in the asylum policy after the Lisbon Treaty are not just a matter of bargaining strategies to maximise member states’ self-interest or just the search for creative joint solutions to the problems. Rather, there is a coexistence of both conflict and cooperation, in which self-interested actors accommodate joint solutions to obtain a non-zero-sum game. Actors are still perceived as rational, who seek to maximise their self-interests. However, their course of action and behaviour are now more constrained by the EU institutional setting.

Does International Law Need a Conscience? Evaluating the India–South Africa Proposal to Suspend TRIPS Obligations and the COVID-19 Vaccines

Abstract There is undoubtedly a consensus within the international community that ‘vaccine nationalism’ is an undesirable state of affairs. However, states are self-interested actors and in the absence of constraints imposed by international economic law this pursuit of rational self-interest is likely to result in an outcome that is unjust on a global scale. The recent proposal by India and South Africa to suspend TRIPS obligations for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic has been rejected within the WTO. This proposal constitutes a recognition of the inadequacies surrounding the TRIPS compulsory licensing scheme. Yet, the immersion of intellectual property law within international investment law together with the proliferation of free trade agreements containing TRIPS-plus obligations would likely have made such a proposal unworkable. We argue that the fundamental problem is that the TRIPS Agreement lacks a defined concept of conscience that governs both its operation and interpretation. Such a principle exists in the common law within the field of private law. The principle, in its various doctrinal iterations, navigates the tensions between different parties while serving an underlying purpose of justice within the common law. It has much to offer international intellectual property law.

Elective Affinities in the Anthropocene: Christianity and the Natural Environment Reconsidered

To reach a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the natural environment, it is important to move beyond essentializing any religious tradition as having a pro-environmental or anti-environmental ethic. Rather, prior work has shown that the canonical, scholarly, and popular literatures and discourse of a number of religious traditions can and have been socially and rhetorically constructed as supporting an array of positions, from preservation to profligacy, and much in between those two ideal types. In this paper, we develop Max Weber’s theory of “elective affinities” and adapt it to the Anthropocene, to make the case that in a fragmented society, people and communities of convenience tend to choose the tropes and framing from the dominant culture to justify self-interested action. That often can take the form of religious discourse. In the sense of finding a wide array of practical interpretations relative to the environment, the theory is largely supported, although we do find important nuances. It is instructive to look at how the language and legitimacy of one institution (e.g. religion) has been used to justify and legitimate that of others (e.g. the polity). While these processes of institutional co-optation can be effective in the short run, they may have corrosive longer-term effects. Key rhetorical, and in fact political, battles in the Third Millennium, will likely be organized around how to adapt pre-industrial religion to late industrial and perhaps post-industrial times, and it remains to see how central the natural environment will be in what communities hold sacred.

Canadian Financial Imperialism and Structural Adjustment in the Caribbean

From the start of the early 1980s, structural adjustment was already normalized in the Caribbean given the power of a variety of self-interested actors, including the U.S., IFIs, and Canadian investors who continued to advance and support— by any means necessary— structural adjustment policies in the Caribbean. Debt traps, coupled with incursions on Caribbean state’s sovereignty would see the neoliberal and capitalist doctrine accepted by all of the independent states in the English-speaking Caribbean region by the mid-1980s. Structural adjustment drastically intensified the existing inequalities in states and removed the ability for governments to alleviate these situations. Alongside Caribbean structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the 1980s was also a successful wave of imperialist (anti-socialist and anti-communist) propaganda. The result being that many of the independent states in the region would see left governments replaced with reactionary conservative ones; And a small number of states confessing themselves to be socialist and/or Marxist-Leninist to receive help from other socialist (and non-aligned) states, like Cuba and the Soviet Union. This article analyzes the causes, characteristics and consequences of the new global international architecture of the 1980s to the 2000s, looking at new opportunities for foreign investors that arose in the 1980s, and how these changes strengthened the already powerful Canadian banks and investors in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Contextual liberalism: the ordoliberal approach to private vices and public benefits

This article highlights the various sources that shaped the genesis of ordoliberalism. In the wake of the emerging project of neoliberalism, ordoliberals created a theory that contains a bundle of claims, which constitute the attempt to merge liberalism and its contextual embedding into a social philosophy that meets the requirements of both—economy and society. They were concerned with a new and properly interpreted liberalism. Not because they did not share the basic assumption of classical liberalism that individual self-interested action is the necessary driving force in advancing economic and social progress, but because they realized that individual action requires an embedding into a social and moral order to deliver public benefits. This insight proves to be the significant difference between ordoliberals of neoliberal facon and the exponents of classical liberalism: namely that the market economy operates based on prerequisites which it cannot itself guarantee. Regarding their very own historical context, this must be seen in light of their concern for the reconstruction of Western societies after the end of the totalitarian Nazi regime. The purpose of ordoliberalism has always been the “consciously shaped” economic order which manifests itself as humane and as functional. Moreover, if one understands ordoliberalism as contextual liberalism, it can also be significant for today’s discourse. In order to achieve this aspiration, ordoliberalism adopts a contextual approach. In particular, linkages can be drawn here to Constitutional Political Economy, and the interaction of these perspectives offer promising benefits for both “thinking-in-orders” traditions.

An elementary humanomics approach to boundedly rational quadratic models

We take a refreshing new look at boundedly rational quadratic models in economics using some elementary modeling of the principles put forward in the book Humanomics by Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson. A simple model is introduced built on the fundamental Humanomics principles of gratitude/resentment felt and the corresponding action responses of reward/punishment in the form of higher/lower payoff transfers. There are two timescales: one for strictly self-interested action, as in economic equilibrium, and another governed by feelings of gratitude/resentment. One of three timescale scenarios is investigated: one where gratitude/resentment changes much more slowly than economic equilibrium (“quenched model”). Another model, in which economic equilibrium occurs over a much slower time than gratitude/resentment evolution (“annealed” model) is set up, but not investigated. The quenched model with homogeneous interactions turns out to be a non-frustrated spin-glass model. A two-agent quenched model with heterogeneous aligning (ferromagnetic) interactions is analyzed and yields new insights into the critical quenched probability p (1−p) that represents the empirical frequency of opportunity for agent i to take action for the benefit (hurt) of other that invokes mutual gratitude (resentment). A critical quenched probability pi∗, i=1,2, exists for each agent. When p<pi∗, agent i will choose action in their self-interest. When p>pi∗, agent i will take action sensitive to their interpersonal feelings of gratitude/resentment and thus reward/punish the initiating benefit/hurt. We find that the pi∗ are greater than one-half, which implies agents are averse to resentful behavior and punishment. This was not built into the model, but is a result of its properties, and consistent with Axiom 4 in Humanomics about the asymmetry of gratitude and resentment. Furthermore, the agent who receives less payoff is more averse to resentful behavior; i.e., has a higher critical quenched probability. For this particular model, the Nash equilibrium has no predictive power of Humanomics properties since the rewards are the same for self-interested behavior, resentful behavior, and gratitude behavior. Accordingly, we see that the boundedly rational Gibbs equilibrium does indeed lead to richer properties.

Citizens as Complicits: Distrust in Politicians and Biased Social Dissemination of Political Information

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

Kin, community, and diverse rural economies: Rethinking resource governance for Alaska rural fisheries

The challenge of designing institutions and resource policy for ecosystem and social resilience in rural and small-scale fisheries is receiving renewed attention in Alaska and elsewhere. Many rural and Indigenous fishing communities have been negatively impacted by modern resource allocation and management regimes that restrict and privatize fishery access through the creation of individual property rights. This article draws on ethnographic and interview data from a multi-sited study to improve policy considerations for rural and small-scale fisheries access. The Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska is a site of concerning social trends including the ‘graying of the fleet’ and a rise in nonlocal ownership of fishing rights. Since the state began limiting entry into salmon fisheries in 1975, local permit holdings in Bristol Bay communities have declined by roughly 50%. This paper examines the ways in which assumptions and norms operating within state, regional, and local institutions support and/or constrain local fishing practices and participation in the region. A central objective is to challenge dominant and universalist assumptions of fishermen as dis-embedded, profit-maximizing, self-interested actors that do not fit well with small-scale, rural, and Indigenous fisheries. This paper identifies social relationships and interdependencies as central to rural fishing communities and livelihoods and absent from the rational choice/individual economic actor assumptions of modern resource allocation and management regimes. Findings presented here offer new framings for environmental analyses and help to inform solutions to ecological and social sustainability concerns marking global fisheries today.

Resisting Abusive Legalism: Electoral Fairness and the Partisan Commitment to Political Pluralism

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on how electoral fairness is vulnerable to abuse by self-interested partisans – especially abuse that conforms to legally and constitutionally sanctioned procedures. This phenomenon sometimes labelled ‘abusive legalism,’ challenges the aspiration to design institutions that depend only on rationally self-interested actors for their endurance. Electoral fairness in particular, we argue, depends on partisans who endorse and act from a commitment to political pluralism. We identify the normative reasons that make sense of such a commitment, and consider the difficulties involved in applying this commitment to practical projects of institutional reform. In this process, we define a theoretical framework that both adds to the expanding literature on democratic partisanship and provides a basis for further empirical research on the mechanisms of democratic backsliding.

Mingling and Strategic Augmentation of International Legal Obligations

AbstractManaging foreign affairs is in no small measure about anticipating the actions (and non-actions) of others, and about taking steps to limit the unexpected—and the undesired. Law has long been recognized as important to these tasks. Nevertheless, standard IR treatments often overlook important properties of law, even when trying to account for international law's effects on behavior. Chief among these overlooked properties is the fact that legal rules are formulated for general use, which means their provisions lack determinate meaning in relation to the full range of facts they may be applied to. Selecting and using legal rules to guide or assess behavior thus requires interpretation. Self-interested actors may differ regarding the applicability, scope, or meaning of individual rules, and still more so where multiple legal rules are in play. In situations where political stakes are high, powerful actors may not be content to leave all options on the table. Instead they may use interpretative tactics to mingle obligations from different agreements and, where needed, to augment relevant legal obligations in efforts to prospectively ensure, in the mode of Riker's heresthetics, that interlocutors feel compelled by legal circumstances to enact the more powerful actor's preferences. I demonstrate how agreement mingling and augmentation function in complex legal environments by reexaming US efforts to insulate its citizens from unwanted exercises of jurisdiction by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Do Attorneys and Judges Contribute to Judicial Delay? Evidence from French Labor Courts

Is it true that French labor judges are contributing to the massive delay in labor grievances because of their politicized background? Is it true that lawyers are self-interested actors that stretch the duration of lawsuits solely to receive higher attorney’s fees? The answers are mixed. This manuscript intends to address the almost neglected crucial issue of delay in labor courts, fitting in the stream of law and economic literature, with particular reference to the analysis of decision-making processes. Most of the studies on the role of judges and attorneys on delay are concentrated in different areas of civil and criminal law in the United States. Very few quantitative studies have addressed this critical issue on French employment tribunals, which are a unique and ancient labor institution in the European panorama. Among the anomalies, these courts are composed of non-professional judges, with short legal training and elected directly among trade unions members and employer associations’ representatives. The role of the litigation market of attorneys on delay is almost neglected, while earlier work has concluded that judges that belong to the most confrontational syndicates play an essential role in litigation stonewalling and judicial delay, once elected in the labor judiciary. This contribution, with the assistance of two-stage least squared estimation techniques, intends to assess the role of these alleged confrontational judges on the litigation process, as well as the role of attorneys on delay, notwithstanding that they are the most qualified and technical actors in the litigation process.

Constitutional catallaxy: friends and enemies in an open-ended social order

Most liberal constitutional theorising, as exemplified by Buchanan (1975) and Rawls (1971), operates with a two-level scheme of analysis. The first level entails agreement on the rules through which a polity is constituted; the second level entails self-interested action inside that framework of rules. Within this framework a polity is constituted through agreement on the rules that frame political action. In this paper, we explore how this scheme of analysis might be relaxed by recognising that acquiescence is not agreement. Hence, people can acquiesce in some framework of governance without truly accepting it. In this alternative framework, agreement on rules is always incomplete, for two sets of reasons. One is the limited and divided quality of knowledge (Hayek, 1937; 1945). The other is the persistent presence of antagonism within society, as conveyed by Carl Schmitt's (1932) distinction between friends and enemies, and with that distinction present as well in William Riker's (1962) theory of political coalitions.

‘To Act upon one's Time …’ From the impulse to resist to global political strategy

This article reflects on the possibilities for political action emerging out of quotidian engagements. Following controversies on the patenting of seeds in Canada and globally within the Committee for Food Security I explore what gave the impulse for political resistance in these different arenas. How did collective action emerge and how did it sustain itself? Three political concepts are important for understanding the political actions that I observed: Eigen-Sinn, empathy and strategy. These allowed me to follow and theorize political engagements. I first reflect on the potential to resist as a capacity of all human beings, because they have Eigen-Sinn: the capacity to attribute their own meanings to things, and act in their own self-interested way according to the meaning given. Self-interested action can only become political, however, when humans go beyond their strictly individual interests and empathize with others (humans and nonhumans), what Adorno described as getting into ‘live contact with the warmth of things’. Finally, I discuss how collective action can become not only possible, but also effective, by building and defending a space for strategic action.

Strategic Institutional Positioning

The administrative state has emerged as a pervasive machine that has become the dominate generator of legal rules—despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution commits the legislative power to Congress alone. When examining legislation authorizing administrative agencies to promulgate rules, we are often left asking whether Congress “dele- gates” away its lawmaking authority by giving agencies too much power and discretion to decide what rules should be promulgated and to determine how rich to make their content. If the agencies get broad authority, it is not too hard to understand why they would fulsomely embrace the grant to its fullest. Once agencies are let loose by broad grants of rulemaking authority and they are off to the races, we are also often left scratching our heads wondering why Congress fails to intervene ex post to alter the law, to check administrative agency overreach, or to clarify its intent and preferences. This Essay seeks to explain why none of the institutional dynamics we observe in adminis- trative law should be surprising, with particular emphasis on environ- mental laws and rules. It will explain why both Congress and agencies have strategic interests at stake that cause them to position their activ- ities in manners that make each complicit in expansion of the regula- tory state and the collapse of the containment walls designed to keep lawmaking inside Congress. This Essay specifically critiques Congress for its abdication of re- sponsibility in the natural resources and environmental space—a place where the problem of congressional acquiescence in the demise of its own power is particularly acute. This Essay will begin by discuss- ing the necessity of legislative clarity and intervention in these fields, but it will also contemplate why we often see neither. It will then pro- ceed to some specific examples that illustrate these points. Part II introduces fundamental ideas of separation of powers and the Framers’ design for adherence to that separation. Part III identi- fies motivations for Congress to legislate broadly and to disengage from a supervisory role over agencies, despite contrary intentions in the Framers design. Part IV discusses agencies as self-interested actors that will accept legislative-like authority if it is offered to them. Part V uses case studies on National Monuments and the Waters of the United States (“WOTUS”) Rule as demonstrative of the strategic positioning phenomenon. And, Part VI explains why environmental law is an area in which we can predict a high frequency of these problems of congressional abdication that enables administrative overreach. By revealing these realities of strategic positioning by both Con- gress and the Executive, it can be better understood why an environ- mental law generated without optimal (or even fully constitutional) engagement by Congress is increasingly developing. The goal is to ex- pose the threat these institutional interests pose to preserving the sep- aration of powers and to begin identifying the areas to target, if the current allocation of authority for generating the core requirements of environmental law is to be realigned with greater fidelity to original constitutional design.

Exit, Voice, and Boilerplate

We review The Dignity of Commerce by Nathan Oman. In summary, Professor Oman explores the relation between contracts and well-functioning markets. Although we could do without the qualifier “well-functioning” to describe markets -- since any actual market is, by definition, well-functioning; otherwise, it would not exist -- we really enjoyed reading Oman’s book. His work forced us to clarify our thinking about the relation between markets and morality. Markets not only promote economic efficiency (i.e. the allocation of assets to their highest valued uses); markets also enable people to serve the needs of others and cooperate in mutually beneficial ways even in the absence of political, religious, or ideological agreement. This last point -- the ability of markets to meet human needs and bring diverse and self-interested actors together -- deserves more attention.

Coordinating Measurements in Uncertain Participatory Sensing Settings

Environmental monitoring allows authorities to understand the impact of potentially harmful phenomena, such as air pollution, excessive noise, and radiation. Recently, there has been considerable interest in participatory sensing as a paradigm for such large-scale data collection because it is cost-effective and able to capture more fine-grained data than traditional approaches that use stationary sensors scattered in cities. In this approach, ordinary citizens (non-expert contributors) collect environmental data using low-cost mobile devices. However, these participants are generally self-interested actors that have their own goals and make local decisions about when and where to take measurements. This can lead to highly inefficient outcomes, where observations are either taken redundantly or do not provide sufficient information about key areas of interest. To address these challenges, it is necessary to guide and to coordinate participants, so they take measurements when it is most informative. To this end, we develop a computationally-efficient coordination algorithm (adaptive Best-Match) that suggests to users when and where to take measurements. Our algorithm exploits probabilistic knowledge of human mobility patterns, but explicitly considers the uncertainty of these patterns and the potential unwillingness of people to take measurements when requested to do so. In particular, our algorithm uses a local search technique, clustering and random simulations to map participants to measurements that need to be taken in space and time. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a real-world human mobility and air quality dataset and show that it outperforms the current state of the art by up to 24% in terms of utility gained.