Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: (to be uploaded)

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The primordial phenomenological/existentialist experience is ethical because it implies human being’s attitude of non-domination towards other human beings and nature. The experience itself is reason/rationality itself, because once the primordial existential experience is restored the instrumental reason/rationality is ‘naturally regulated’ by value reason/rationality; in other words, value reason implies instrumental reason and both reasons are actually reason itself. Though the mechanism of reason and rationality is more complicated and incorporates the existential, psychological, and social process, only reason and rationality can solve the environmental problem.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholars of ethnopolitics generally agree that ethnopolitical identities are constructed and re-constructed through strategic choices in the course of social, economic and political interactions. This paper describes a dataset on ethnopolitical groups and cleavage patterns in Africa that is motivated by this combination of constructivist and rationalist approaches to ethnopolitics. The paper first clarifies the logic of ?constrained constructivism? and how it informed the theoretical foundation of the dataset and the methodology employed to specify 375 ethnopolitical groups at three levels of inclusiveness in 43 African countries. It then (a) presents comparative data on two measures of ethnopolitical cleavages at each of these levels? an index of ethnopolitical fragmentation and an index of ethnopolitical concentration ? derived from this dataset, (b) explains the conceptualization and calculation of these measures, and (c) elucidates, with illustrative examples, their theoretical implications and explanatory significance for comparative analysis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The content of actor beliefs and the way in which they form these beliefs play a central role in intentionalist accounts of political behavior, perhaps most explicitly in a widely applied class of game theoretic models. Presenting a signaling game of ethnic mobilization, this paper challenges the claim that such models constitute a rational choice version of interpretive social science and sketches a hermeneutic perspective on strategic action that suggests the importance of mental models in belief formation. History creates emotionally charged mental models that generate biased beliefs about the choice context and the costs associated with different strategies, leading to different choices of actions by agents with different mental models. In order to provide a rational interpretation of significant political events, it is necessary to specify the causal mechanisms linking history and emotion to the beliefs that drive rational choice.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In political science, rational and bounded learning are commonly studied as two opposing explanations of policy choice. In this paper, I use a rational learning approach to advance conclusions about bounded learning, showing that the two concepts need not necessarily be incompatible. By examining the decision of a set of developing countries to open up their trade regimes and a rational learning model, I show that countries are particularly influenced by the choices of neighbouring countries and by particularly successful policy experiences. These are two typical contentions of the bounded learning literature. I also take advantage of the discussion on rational vs. bounded learning to explore more general issues regarding the diffusion of policy innovations.