Community coalitions promote empowerment by providing pathways for residents and organizations to gain and apply new skills, grow in leadership, and play an active role in calling for and creating community change. Coalitions create synergy through strategic pooling of diverse and complementary perspectives, connections, and resources. This chapter provides a brief overview of coalitions and how they operate as a community change mechanism by providing a structure to create changes in policies, systems, and environments. We present a case study of the California Healthy Cities and Communities initiative in which leaders in twenty communities with underserved or vulnerable populations were empowered to address environmental and structural determinants of community well-being. Next, we review the literature on how coalitions have been studied as a mechanism for community empowerment across disciplines and levels of empowerment. We conclude with recommendations for future research, including a greater focus on equity and understanding community change processes.

Status hierarchy likely exists in all human societies, whether pronounced or more subtle, and even in more egalitarian societies where resources are widely shared and overt status-seeking is actively policed. This chapter reviews models of the evolution of status hierarchy, including models from behavioral ecology as well as from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. A central concern of these disparate models is the adaptive problem of why any individual should adopt a subordinate status if higher status tends to increase fitness. Solutions to this problem involve the benefits to individuals from avoiding costs of repeated competition over resources or from deferring to prestigious others. Hierarchy can facilitate coordination and collective action that, in humans, enables both the massive scale of our societies and unparalleled levels of exploitation. These explanations are summarized in detail while addressing related questions, including: Do women and men differ in status-seeking? What contributes to variation in status hierarchy across species and across human societies? The goals of this chapter are to highlight consilience and provoke new directions within the evolutionary literature on status hierarchy.

This chapter discusses what makes a coalition of interest groups powerful with elected officials, and why a coalition builder is necessary to turn a disparate set of Interests into an influential coalition. The chapter also provides a tool called Coalition Dashboard which, for a given policy agenda, helps to visually assess the power of pro and con coalitions.

This chapter unpacks internal dynamics of political parties and introduces a factional theory of party behavior. The central assertion is that political parties are factional coalitions with different perspectives on political issues. The aim herein is twofold. First, the chapter traces how individual preferences aggregate into group preferences in the form of factional politics. Second, it explores the conditions under which one faction prevails over others. This chapter thus offers a theory of coalition-building within political parties by identifying different types of incentive structures and organizational resources. Factions strive for control over such resources to capture and control the party. Once they form a dominant coalition, they align the party’s trajectory with their own worldview. This chapter builds on the existing studies of behavioral and ideological change to address the issue of aggregation and fill the gap in the literature. It concludes with a brief discussion of these dynamics in the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda.

We set out the case for computational social science as opposed to traditional “pencil and paper” formal methods. The substantive theme of this book is the governance cycle in parliamentary democracies, but the ideas we put forward can be applied to many other areas of study.

We describe the institutional environment for the governance cycle in parliamentary democracies and the preferences of senior politicians over key political payoffs. We are not concerned here with electoral politics, so treat an election as a “black box” which, in expectation, administers unbiased random shock to party seat shares. Elections trigger government formation. The government, once formed is subject to a steam of unbiased shocks, some of which may perturb either the environment or the preferences of senior politicians sufficiently to cause them now to prefer some alternative to the incumbent government. The more susceptible an incumbent to such shocks, according to the model, the less stable it is likely to be. Politicians’ policy preferences are described in terms of their ideal positions on a large number of binary issues, and the relative importance they attach to each issue. The utility they derive from any government is described as a convex combination of the distance between their policy preferences and the agreed government policy position, which may involve “agreeing to disagree” on some issues; and their share of the fixed perks of office.

We outline the core argument of the book and steps taken to establish this. We begin by sketching component parts of the governance cycle: election, government formation, and government survival. Noting that the analysis of this complex system is intractable for traditions deductive methods of formal modeling, we preview two different computational methods for analyzing it. First, we model “functionally rational” artificial agents who use simple but effective rules of thumbs to navigate their high stakes but complex environment (ABM). Second, we specify an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm which, by massively repeated self-play, teaches itself to find near-optimal strategies for playing what is in effect a traditional, but intractable, noncooperative game. We conclude by sketching the empirical approach we use to first calibrate and exercise the models on training data and then test them on out-of-sample test data.

What is the most fundamental challenge facing democracies today? One major concern is democratic backsliding, regression, or the rise of “illiberal democracies.” Another concern, closely related, is the rise of “populism,” at least in certain forms, such as those that are fundamentally anti-pluralist and view the “people” as a “moral, homogenous entity whose will cannot err,”1 or, in less virulent form, those that express impatience with institutional structures and norms – such as judicial review, independent institutions, or separation of powers – that stand in the way of direct, unmediated expression of the “popular will.” Good reasons exist for these concerns across many democracies today. But, in my view, the deepest and perhaps most enduring challenge to democratic governments across the West that has emerged in recent years is what I call “political fragmentation.”2 Put briefly, political fragmentation is the dispersion of political power into so many different hands and power centers that it becomes extremely difficult to marshal enough political power and authority for governments to function effectively.

This chapter reviews current knowledge of the red colobus, Piliocolobus, a polytypic widespread colobine living in sub-Saharan African forests, woodlands, mangroves, and riparian forests. The taxonomy of Piliocolobus has undergone many changes and is still unresolved, resulting in confusion and possibly hindering conservation efforts. Red colobus is known for being the favourite prey of chimpanzees in many locations, and in several populations red colobus associate with guenons to reduce predation risk. Less well-known are their sexual swellings, which vary greatly in size across the genus, and their graded vocal repertoire that lacks a long call, but in some cases includes female mating calls. Noisy, large multi-female multi-male groups, female dispersal, philopatric males that form coalitions, and lack of female allomothering are considered the norm for the genus but these are not universal. Red colobus is facing extirpation in many locations due to human hunting and forest destruction. Various serious diseases and parasites are also reported for many populations and are often associated with human encroachment into their habitat. Much about the social behaviour is yet to be studied, especially in the less-studied central African species assemblage.

This chapter presents the book’s core theoretical contribution of the transnational lawmaking coalition (TLC), a concept that brings fresh insight to the IR and IO literatures. Operating outside the IO borders of the treaty body system, TLCs are informal and temporary coalitions of state-empowered expert bodies and issue professionals that, in pressing for clarification of state obligations through the instrument of treaty interpretations, can contribute to the development of international law without direct government involvement. This chapter distinguishes TLCs from other collective transnational actor-types, introduces the main triggers of a TLC’s genesis, explains the logic behind its members’ participation in such a coalition, and articulates how TLCs organize their drafting work and under which conditions they are influential.

As the very concept of TLCs rests on this notion of their being a lawmaking coalition through treaty interpretations, the General Comments (GC), the chapter introduces the UN human rights treaty bodies and gives data on their decision-making rules, their membership, workload, and on the instrument of interest for this book, the GCs. This chapter explains what GCs are, the degree to which the UN treaty bodies use GCs in different functions, and how state parties and scholars understand – and contest – GCs’ legal substance. Moving beyond notions of formal authority, the chapter argues for GCs’ authoritativeness because they serve as necessary reference points to human rights, especially because a broader community (NGOs, domestic courts, specialized agencies) enacts them in the realms of domestic law, politics, and civil society. Ultimately, what this chapter makes eminently apparent is that general comments’ authoritativeness depends less on state recognition and more on the multitude of actors breathing life into their interpretations.