In international affairs, legal arguments and political actions shape each other. Unlike in domestic affairs, there is no enforcement authority, and hence there is much debate over how international law affects politics. Many existing approaches do not help us to assess what implementation efforts tell us about a state’s commitment to international law. Some study the effect of law on state behaviour but have a too static understanding of law and state preferences. Others focus on the justificatory discourse that accompanies norm implementation but do not assess individual states’ commitment to contested norms. This chapter studies what a state’s effort to implement a norm tells us about its sense of obligation towards that norm. I propose there are three signposts of obligation in the words and actions that accompany a state’s norm implementation: consistency, publicity, and engagement with the international community. I show that depending on whether the behaviour and discourse of a state displays a strong or weak sense of obligation, we can characterise a state’s norm implementation as exposing weak or strong normative influence or discursive or behavioral norm avoidance. I illustrate these different degrees with cases that involve a variety of different norms and states.

This chapter describes the main traits of the prevailing view on corruption. In particular, the current consensus view on corruption is all but monolithic, and at its “soft edges” we find themes that in fact deserve center stage, such as the elusive and contested nature of the concept. For example, although a narrow concept of corruption has predominated, it is acknowledged that the concept is elusive and its nature contested. Furthermore, it is frequently recognized that reference to corruption may have a certain degree of instrumentality, and specifically, that an anti-corruption discourse may be utilized as a means to settle scores with political adversaries. Another related theme at the edge of the current debate concerns the relationship between corruption and other social phenomena. On one hand, much effort has been dedicated to understanding the causes and effects of corruption. However, it is often recognized that the concept of corruption, being elusive, is also multifaceted and cannot be considered in isolation. The book intends to move these themes from the edges to the center of the debate.

In this chapter, I introduce instrumental and expressive partisanship as well as its their different predictions for political behavior.

Chapter 2 shows the falseness of two ideas that underlie the central elements of privacy law: that people make fully rational privacy choices and that they don’t care about their privacy. These notions create a dissonance between law and reality, which prevents laws from providing meaningful privacy protections. Contrary to rationality, context has an outsized impact on our privacy decisions and we can’t understand what risks are involved in our privacy “choices,” particularly with AI inferences. The notion that we’re apathetic is prevalent in popular discourse about how much people share online and the academic literature about “the privacy paradox.” Dismantling the myth of apathy shows there’s no privacy paradox. People simply face uncertainty and unknowable risks. People make privacy choices in a context of anti-privacy design, such as dark patterns. In this process, we’re manipulated by corporations, who are more aware of our biases than regulators are.

If every act is either right or wrong simpliciter, a morally conscientious agent is rationally permitted to perform any of the right acts but none of the wrong ones. But what should a morally conscientious agent do when faced with a choice between options that are somewhat right and somewhat wrong? Five possible decision criteria are discussed. According to the maximizing criterion, it is rationally permissible to perform act a if and only if no option is right to a greater degree. The liberal criterion holds that it is rationally permissible to perform every act that is not entirely wrong, and the threshold criterion asserts that is rationally permissible to perform an act just in case it is not more wrong than right. The gappy criterion holds that if an act is neither right nor wrong simpliciter, then there is no fact of the matter about whether it is rationally permissible to perform. Finally, the probabilistic criterion maintains that if an act is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, then the act is rationally permissible to perform if and only if it is chosen randomly with a probability that reflects its degree of rightness.

The idea that the political preferences of citizens and voters are expressive rather than instrumental is well established, and lays a foundation for understanding why citizens and voters adopt the policy preferences offered to them by the elite. Voters realize that no matter how they vote, election outcomes will be unaffected. When they make choices in the market, they get what they choose. When they make political choices, what they get is unaffected by what they choose. Thus, voters may vote for outcomes they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone. The distinction between instrumental and expressive preferences, discussed in this chapter, lays a foundation for the material that follows.

Chapter 8 lays out a menu of well-travelled theoretical frameworks. This includes (a) motivational frameworks (interests, norms, psychology), (b) structural frameworks (material factors, human capital/demography, institutions), and (c) interactive frameworks (adaptation, coordination, diffusion, networks, path dependence).

Rational choice theory explains and evaluates how individuals choose among alternative instruments to achieve their goals and objectives. Although much research on political decision-making highlights psychological biases that appear to interfere with rationality, the contrast between rational choice and the psychology of information processing is often narrowed by individual and contextual conditions that reduce cognitive biases and promote rational decision-making. This argument is developed by analysing research on heuristics (i.e., shortcuts and cues), motivated reasoning, and framing that pose challenges to rational choice. Three themes emerge from this review. First, there is systematic variation across individuals in the extent to which heuristics, biased reasoning, and framing produce unreasonable and suboptimal decisions. Second, there are definable informational and social contexts that provide incentives for people to engage in deliberate and accurate processing of information. Third, normative evaluations of empirical results have been hampered by inconsistent criteria for what constitutes good decision-making.

GAL is one of the most ambitious projects to capture the role of procedure in global governance. Other concepts are briefly introduced and compared. The idea of procedural justice as akin to GAL in scope but focusing on perceptions of fairness and legitimacy rather than normativity emerges.

The main strands of international relations theory regarding institutions are briefly introduced. The work focuses on rational choice, notably Rational Institutional Design theory.

To unite the concept of procedural justice with the perspective and methods of rational institutional design, the factor of state interest is studied. It is shown how state interest can operate even within nominally private institutions and which factors determine whether and how a state is interested in introducing procedural justice.

The codebook variables creating the matrix of sensitivity of state interest - quantitative and qualitative procedural density is introduced. The mode of sample collection is explained.

Humans often appear to defy principles of economic "rationality" when making decisions, by falling prey to a suite of choice biases including over-weighting immediate gratification, avoiding risk, treating identical options differently depending on whether they are perceived as a relative loss or gain, or attaching more value to objects in their possession. Here we examine what animals can tell us about these choice patterns. First, we provide an overview of different theoretical frameworks for rational decision making from psychology, economics, and biology. Next, we review empirical work examining how different species make decisions and discuss how many potentially puzzling patterns of decision making may be biologically adaptive when considering the environment in which they are made. Finally, we propose that integrating various theoretical perspectives with comparative data can elucidate the ultimate origins of variations in decision-making strategies across species and provide a new framework to illuminate the adaptive value of these strategies.

International law does not address intelligence activities explicitly, and many scholars assume that international law has no effect on the practice of intelligence. Yet, international courts and bodies have recently started to hold states to account for internationally wrongful acts resulting from intelligence cooperation. This chapter analyses the effects of recent instances of state accountability on state decision-making, using a modified rational choice model accounting for the boundedness of state rationality. It shows that these instances of state accountability have changed the payoffs and costs of intelligence cooperation. States must now take into account the risk of accountability, and considerations of international legality may now outweigh domestic considerations. The chapter therefore argues that recent instances of state accountability before international courts and bodies have constrained states’ freedom in intelligence cooperation, thereby serving their national security interests. Existing research shows that respect for the rule of law is necessary to an effective fight against national security threats, and that measures violating human rights or undermining the rule of law are counter-productive. Hence, the chapter further argues that these recent instances of state accountability increase states’ respect for the international rule of law, leading them to protect their national security more effectively.