Preface

Summary

This book is an introduction to formal models of domestic politics. It is based on a course I have taught at Wisconsin since 2004 (and at Harvard in 2012), and I expect that readers of the text will have the background that students in my course have had: a semester of game theory at the level of Osborne (2004) or McCarty and Meirowitz (2007) and familiarity with basic differential and integral calculus. My course is in the Political Science Department but has always attracted a few economists, and I anticipate that the book will similarly be useful to scholars in both disciplines.

Notwithstanding this claim to interdisciplinarity, a primary goal in writing this book has been to strip away some of the economics from well known models of political economy. I cut my teeth in graduate school on Persson and Tabellini (2000), from which I learned much, but I quickly learned that I would need to teach a lot of economics if I were to use that text in a political science course. More generally, formal models of domestic politics are as likely today to appear in economics as in political science journals, and some translation is necessary if they are to be accessible beyond the economics discipline. Conversely, there are numerous important models published in political science journals that are not well known among economists; this text provides an introduction.