Private Desires, Political Action

Michael Laver is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science, Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Playing Politics: The Nightmare Continues (1997); Making and Breaking Governments: Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies (1996, with Kenneth A Shepsle) and Representative Government in Modern Europe (1995, with Michael Gallagher and Peter Mair).

• IntroductionRational ActorsCollective ActionPolitical Entrepreneurs, Politicians and PartiesVotingParty CompetitionThe Politics of CoalitionConclusion

`Private Desires, Political Action should be compulsory reading for every student of politics. This book is a rarity on at least two counts. First of all, it is an effortless yet inspiring guided tour of the contribution of rational choice theory to political science... Secondly, as Laver is concerned with substance rather than technique, he has written a very accessible book unashamedly free from mathematical formulas′ - Political Studies`With wit, style, and grace, on the one hand, and an impressive economy of presentation, on the other, Professor Michael Laver manages to embrace and envelop the entire rational choice program in political science of the past half century. He takes complicated materials and makes them transparent to the reader, not by reducing them to simplistic chat, but rather by teasing out the elemental features of the arguments and stitching them back together in an altogether reader-friendly fashion. In short, Private Desires, Political Action is a smooth and intellectually satisfying experience′ - Kenneth A Shepsle, Harvard University