This chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the financial statecraft of borrowers, drawing on bargaining frameworks to develop expectations for how a diversified portfolio of external finance enhances a country's leverage in aid negotiations with traditional donors. The chapter begins with donors' and recipients' preferences in negotiations, highlighting that donors have strategic and institutional reasons to provide development assistance, which leads them to compete in a marketplace for aid. When recipient countries diversify their portfolios of external finance, this diminishes their reliance on traditional donors and donors risk losing influence, in turn encouraging donors to provide more attractive aid. However, recipients vary in their ability to exploit this leverage, which depends on their strategic significance to donors and donor trust in their credibility.

The introduction previews the argument that developing countries can use borrowing relationships to their advantage. It situates this argument about the financial statecraft of borrowers within the literature on sovereign debt, foreign aid, and African politics. It explains the specific focus on sub-Saharan Africa by outlining three dynamics that enabled African governments to diversify their portfolios of external finance in the early twenty-first century: debt relief, Chinese lending, and liquidity in international bond markets. The chapter describes the book's mixed-methods research design, combining statistical analysis of the terms of aid agreements with three case studies of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ghana. Finally, the chapter highlights how the financial statecraft of borrowers contributes to debates on financial interdependence, multipolarity, and the agency of developing countries.

Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

In previous chapters, the CSF is presented as a “black box” that encapsulates the rules and workings of the contest. This chapter explains the mechanisms behind this black box. This could include how efforts may translate, with some uncertainty, into performance, or a planner with given objectives such as designing a contest on television or procuring inputs for a firm. Additionally, the outcome of a conflict may be negotiated or decided by a jury once claims have been presented. Finally, the chapter explores the basic properties that a contest must have, such as the relationship between effort and probability of winning, and how these properties translate into different CSFs. This is known as the axiomatic approach. These different approaches are able to recover some of the main CSFs already presented in the previous chapter.

Divisions of labor are common among many species. They occur when some sets of individuals (usually defined by age or gender) regularly perform specific tasks, either as a result of individual decision-making patterned by social and ecological contexts (differences in labor), or emerging from an organized, cooperative task specialization designed to benefit a larger collective (divisions of labor). This chapter explores both differences in labor and divisions of labor by drawing on ethnographic cases of subsistence production. These case studies illustrate how intrinsic variation in size and strength may structure differences in labor by age, and they demonstrate how variation in the assessment of acquisition risk may influence women’s and men’s subsistence decisions. These differences may lead to true cooperative divisions of labor when team rates, bargaining, or signaling reduce conflicts of interest between individuals, in turn facilitating increased returns to scale for larger collectives, families, households, or other unit of economic production. Understanding the maintenance of patterns in "divisions of" and "differences in" labor provides a firmer foundation for explanatory models of human decision-making, ranging from questions about the emergence of our genus to contemporary patterning in occupational specialization and gender identity.

This chapter presents the bargaining model of war. The basic approach of the bargaining model is to frame the onset, prosecution, and termination of war as a bargaining process: war represents a failure of two sides to reach a peaceful bargain settling a dispute over an issue such as a territorial border, and during war states continue to bargain, searching for a peace settlement both sides prefer over continuing to fight. Using very little math, the chapter introduces a number of key concepts, such as ideal points, reservation points, reversion outcomes, and bargaining space. It also lays out three possible bargaining model explanations as to why wars break out: when the sides disagree about the likely outcome of a war; when at least one side doubts the credibility of the other side to abide by commitments to peace; and when the issue under dispute is perceived to be indivisible. The chapter also develops information and commitment credibility perspectives on bargaining during wartime, and how wars eventually end. It applies these ideas to a summary of a quantitative study of the effects of peacekeeping on civil war outcomes, and to a case study of World War II in the Pacific.

In the real world, when people play games, they often receive advice from those that have played it before them. Such advice can facilitate the creation of a convention of behavior. This chapter studies the impact of advice on the behavior of subjects who engage in a non-overlapping generational ultimatum game where, after a subject plays, she is replaced by another subject to whom she can offer advice. Our results document the fact that allowing advice fosters the creation of a convention of behavior in ultimatum games. In addition, by reading the advice offered, we conclude that arguments of fairness are rarely used to justify the offers of senders but are relied upon to justify rejections by receivers.

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 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.

The conclusion synthesizes and reflects upon the case studies and comparative and theoretical contributions in the book. The cases are organized around three categories: first, relatively conventional decentralization initiatives in which reforms were adopted to improve governance; second, contexts in which decentralization has been contemplated as a framework for self-determination for the region’s stateless communities; and finally, decentralization initiatives undertaken in the shadow of conflict and state fragmentation. This concluding chapter develops theoretical insights drawn from the rich terrain for qualitative comparison across these three contexts. It offers reflections on key characteristics of the shared regional context and a typology of factors driving decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It argues that an important contribution of the volume lies in identifying a broader array of motivations for, and actors driving, decentralization than currently reflected in the scholarly literature and in parsing the implications for the institutional design of decentralized government. The chapter concludes by distilling patterns from the cases to identify distinct trajectories of decentralization that are evidenced in the MENA region and their entailments.

Chapter 2 presents a statement of the book’s theory. The geography and demography of the post-Soviet space suggests a strategic game with three actors, all second-guessing each others strategies: peripheral elites in Russian-speaking communities, “national” elites in the capital, and elites in the Kremlin. The output of bargaining processes is the distribution of symbolic cultural goods. The game is played in two stages. In the first, inside Russian-speaking communities, elites attempt to coordinate to threaten to secede, or not. In the second stage, bargaining takes place between the capital and the potentially seditious community. If bargaining breaks down, the Russian government might intervene. We outline the analytic narrative structure that organizes the remainder of the book. The theory is formalized in a mathematical appendix (Appendix A).