En raison de sa force explicative et opérationnelle, la théorie du choix rationnel est utilisée au sein de plusieurs disciplines des sciences sociales. Alors que la majorité des économistes conçoivent la théorie du choix rationnel comme un processus de maximisation de l’utilité, la portée de ce modèle est le sujet de nombreuses critiques. Pour plusieurs, certaines préférences ne peuvent être modulées à l’intérieur de ce cadre. Dans ce mémoire, trois conceptions alternatives de la théorie du choix rationnel sont présentées : la rationalité comme présence virtuelle, la rationalité comme mécanisme intentionnel et la rationalité en tant que science du choix. Une analyse critique de celles-ci est effectuée. En design institutionnel, ces trois conceptions de la rationalité offrent des perspectives distinctes. La première met l’emphase sur les motivations non-égocentriques. La seconde mise sur l’aspect adaptatif du processus. La rationalité jouant un rôle privilégié, mais non exclusif, les mécanismes causaux doivent également être considérés. La troisième implique de formuler des règles institutionnels différentes dépendamment du modèle de l’agent rationnel qui est mis de l’avant. L’établissement de règles institutionnelles varie en fonction de la conception adoptée parmi ces théories du choix rationnel. / Because of its explanatory and operational strengths, rational choice theory is used in a variety of social sciences disciplines. Most economists understand rational choice theory as a utility maximization process. For this reason, the reach of the rational model has been subject of a great deal of criticism. For many commentators, there are preferences that cannot be represented by this model of explanation. In the following, three alternative rational choice theory accounts will be presented: the rationality as a virtual presence, rationality as an intentional mechanism and rationality as a science of choice. Each rationality account offers a different view of institutional design. The first focus on agents non-egoistic motivations. The second, on the adaptive aspect with an emphasis on causal mechanism. The third, on the multiplicity of rational actor models. Depending of which rational choice theory account is adopted, implications in institutional design will be different.

The topic of this thesis is a theoretical analysis of the institutional design of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) after the adoption of the Lisbon treaty. The main aim of the thesis is to reveal the reasons explaining a development towards centralization of the policy-making process of the CFSP that the Lisbon treaty introduced. Centralization is equated with a delegation of sovereignty from member states to a supranational level - High Representative for the CFSP/European External Action Service. The thesis for this purpose tests three possible explanations built upon three main theories of international relations: the centralisation as a result of the 1.decreasing EU's relative military power (neorealism) 2.deteriorating collaborative problems (neoliberalism) and 3.increasing degree of Europeanization of the nation-state identities and interests of the member states (constructivism) within covered time period from 2001 to 2007. The thesis applies a qualitative method, it is a case study. The conclusion of the thesis is that there are two reasons for the development towards more centralized policy-making process of the CFSP after the Lisbon treaty. Firstly, it is the decreasing EU's relative military power (neorealism) and secondly increasing level of Europeanization of nation-state...

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This thesis provides an institutional explanation for the peaceful solution of the conflict between the Moldovan state and its small Gagauz minority in the period from 1988 to 1995. The central argument is that different institutional arrangements during this time had a direct effect on the Moldovan state’s capacity to bring about autonomy for the Gagauz. I show how Gagauz leaders, conditioned by the territorial-based structures of the Soviet Union, mobilized a political movement to push for the creation of an autonomous republic, and how this preference for autonomy remained the consistent demand of the Gagauz throughout the early years of post-communist transition. This finding supports the contention that Gagauz preferences cannot be used to explain the rich variation in political outcomes during this period. I assert that the critical changes were essentially institutional: new electoral laws; revised parliamentary rules and procedures; and a complete rewriting of Moldova’s constitution. These innovations were crucial in enabling the inclusive-minded majority in the Moldovan parliament to overcome the power of nationalist veto players by increasing the majority’s control of the legislative agenda. The importance of these institutional factors is examined by careful analysis of the different stages of the Moldovan parliament’s accommodation of the Gagauz: from separatism and stalemate to compromise. Furthermore, I reassert the central role of institutional arrangements by discounting the external influence of Turkey as a patron state on the successful negotiations between Moldova and the Gagauz. Using previously unresearched archival material, unstructured interviews with many of the key actors, and local media reporting, this thesis challenges existing accounts of the Gagauz conflict in Moldova. These accounts assert that either the Gagauz reaction to titular nationalism or the shifting preferences of strategic-thinking elites was the key causal factor of the political outcomes observed during this period. In contrast, this thesis shows that institutional design played a decisive role in the resolution of this conflict. The findings of this research offer useful lessons for other ethnically-divided states with mobilized minorities.

Quel rôle les entreprises doivent-elles jouer dans la société ? Dans le premier chapitre, nous critiquons l’idée selon laquelle les entreprises ont des responsabilités sociales au-delà de la loi : elles n’ont ni les capacités ni la légitimité démocratique d’agir au nom du bien commun. Elles doivent se contenter d’assumer leur rôle économique en respectant la loi. Cependant, celui-ci inclut la distribution des richesses. Le deuxième chapitre présente trois intuitions issues de la pensée économique classique. Celles-ci permettent de justifier une distribution égalitaire des revenus du travail. Dans le troisième chapitre, nous montrons que les entreprises ont un rôle important dans la coordination des activités économiques et doivent être des institutions clés dans l’instauration d’une distribution plus égalitaire des revenus. Pour promouvoir cet objectif distributif, il faut repenser la propriété, la régulation et le design institutionnel des entreprises. Il faut par exemple favoriser les coopératives et la démocratie d’entreprise. / What role should firms play in modern economies ? In the first chapter, I criticize the idea that firms have broad social responsibilities beyond the law : they have neither the capacity nor the democratic legitimacy to act on behalf of the common good. They must therefore stick to their economic role. However, when defining this economic role, one should include distributive considerations. The second chapter exposes three intuitions of classical economists. These provide the basis to justify an equal distribution of labour income. In the third chapter, I show that firms play an important role in coordinating economic activities, and should be key institutions in establishing a fairer distribution of labour income. In order to promote this distributive goal, one must rethink the ownership and institutional design of firms. For example, the regulation should promote cooperative ownership and workplace democracy.

Cette thèse porte sur les fondements philosophiques des institutions démocratiques canadiennes et analyse comment leur conception réelle contribue à les atteindre. Pour passer de la théorie à la pratique, la démocratie doit être institutionnalisée. Les institutions ne sont pas que de simples contraintes sur les actions du gouvernement. Elles incarnent des normes démocratiques. Cependant, les théories démocratiques contemporaines sont souvent abstraites et désincarnées. Alors qu’elles étudient les fondements normatifs de la démocratie en général, elles réfléchissent rarement sur les mécanismes permettant d’atteindre l’idéal démocratique. À l’inverse, la science politique tente de tracer l’ensemble du paysage institutionnel entourant l’action de l’État. Mais l’approche de la science politique a une faiblesse majeure : elle n’offre aucune justification épistémologique ou morale des institutions démocratiques. Cette dichotomie entre les principes et les institutions est trompeuse. Les principes de la démocratie libérale sont incarnés par les institutions. En se concentrant sur les fondements philosophiques des institutions démocratiques et libérales, cette thèse fait revivre une longue tradition d’Aristote à John Stuart Mill et réunissant des penseurs comme Montesquieu et James Madison. Actuellement, la recherche universitaire se détourne encore des questions institutionnelles, sous prétexte qu’elles ne seraient pas assez philosophiques. Cependant, le design institutionnel est une question philosophique. Cette thèse propose des améliorations pour que les institutions démocratiques remplissent leur rôle philosophique de manière plus adéquate. Le suicide médicalement assisté est utilisé comme un exemple de l’influence des institutions sur la démocratie. / This thesis focuses on the philosophical foundations of the Canadian democratic institutions and how their actual design contributes to achieve them. To move from theory to practice, democracy must be institutionalized. Institutions are not only mere constraints on government actions. They embody democratic norms. However, contemporary democratic theories are often abstract and disembodied. While they study the normative foundations of democracy in general, they rarely reflect on mechanisms to achieve the democratic ideal. On the opposite, political science tries to draw the whole institutional landscape surrounding the state’s action. But the political science approach has a major weakness: it offers no epistemological or moral justifications for democratic institutions. This dichotomy between principles and institutions is misleading. The principles of liberal democracy are embodied by institutions. By focusing on the philosophical foundations of democratic and liberal institutions, this thesis revives a long tradition from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill, bringing together thinkers like Montesquieu and James Madison. Nowadays, academic research still diverts from institutional issues under the pretext that they would not be philosophical enough. However, institutional design is a philosophical matter. This thesis proposes improvements for democratic institutions to fulfill their philosophical role more adequately. Physician-assisted suicide is used as an example of the influence of institutions on democracy.

Cortes e sociedade civil na América Latina estão em transformação, assim como a sua relação. Casos de grande repercussão social, decisões judiciais que incidem sobre políticas públicas, concentração de efeitos das sentenças, mecanismos de deliberação dentro dos processos são fenômenos relacionados a essas transformações. A tese deste trabalho é de que tanto o desenho institucional das cortes influencia a mobilização social jurídica, quanto a presença de uma forte mobilização social em torno das cortes pode influenciar não só a sua agenda de casos, mas também o seu desenho institucional. E esta relação precisa ser estudada de modo dinâmico e funcional. Para tanto, foram realizadas entrevistas com organizações não governamentais, think tanks, acadêmicos, magistrados e agência financiadora na Argentina, Brasil e Colômbia. É a narrativa comparada desses atores que oferece as variáveis de desenho institucional e mobilização social jurídica relevantes para compreender essas transformações. O trabalho, por fim, aponta para a necessidade de reformulação das agendas dos atores envolvidos sobre como pensar a inter-relação entre cortes e sociedade civil, tanto em termos de experimentação prática, imaginação institucional, desafios teóricos e de legitimação. / Courts and civil society in Latin America are under transformation, as well as the relationship between them. Cases of great social repercussion, judicial decisions which affect public policies, concentration effects of judgments, deliberation mechanisms within the processes are phenomena related to these changes. The thesis of this work is that both the institutional design of the courts affect social legal mobilization and the presence of strong social mobilization around the courts can influence not only their cases agenda, but also its institutional design. This relationship needs to be studied in a dynamic and functional way. To this end, interviews were conducted with nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, scholars, judges and funding agencies in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. It is the compared narrative of these actors that offers the \"variables\" of institutional design and of legal and social mobilization that are relevant to understand these changes. The thesis finally points to the need to reform the agendas of the actors involved on the reflections about the interplay between courts and civil society, in terms of practical experimentation, institutional imagination, theoretical challenges and legitimation.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo a análise do Conselho Municipal de Educação de Ribeirão Preto (CMERP) a partir de três aspectos essenciais - os contornos do seu desenho institucional, os conteúdos dos seus processos deliberativos e os sentidos da participação em seu contexto. Es-peramos que essa análise possa indicar os caminhos que têm sido tomados por conselheiras e conselheiros no espaço participativo do Conselho, bem como compreender suas conquistas e desafios na direção da ampliação democrática. Os objetivos específicos são a investigação sobre o traçado e o funcionamento instituicional, a efetividade dos processos deliberativos e as rela-ções que se estabelecem numa conjuntura de partilha de poder entre o Poder Público e a socie-dade civil. O enfoque metodológico é qualitativo, com a reunião de dados documentais e a coleta de entrevistas semiestruturadas. O fenômeno da participação democrática no Brasil, em especial por meio das mais diversas instituições participativas criadas desde a redemocratização do país, tem gerado um campo vasto de pesquisas empíricas que tomam por base a democracia como processo de deliberação argumentativa e buscam avaliar ganhos e dificuldades desse ca-minho. Os resultados produzidos dentro de algumas décadas de funcionamento das instituições participativas ganham a centralidade da agenda de pesquisa, que busca medir a capacidade de tornar mais democráticas as relações entre Poder Público e sociedade civil. Para a nossa pesquisa, realizamos a análise de dados colhidos sobre o CMERP - a legislação, as atas das reuniões ordinárias e extraordinárias, o Plano Municipal de Educação de Ribeirão Preto, as entrevistas com conselheiras e conselheiros e as notas de campo. O CMERP é um conselho em funcionamento e que cumpre com suas atribuições legais. A instituição conta com uma participação marcadamente fiscalizatória do Poder Público e das políticas educacionais, com uma representação concentrada nos segmentos da educação municipal, em especial do professorado. Dentre os desafios encontrados em termos de ampliação democrática, estão a aproximação da sociedade civil e a diversificação dos setores representados internamente. / This research aims to analyze the Municipal Education Council of Ribeirão Preto (CMERP) through three essentials aspects: the outlines of its institutional design, the contentes of its de-liberative processes and the meanings of the participation in its context. We hope this analysis may indicate the paths that have been taken by counselers in the Council\'s participative space, as well as the understanding of its conquers and challenges towards a democratic enlargement. The specific objectives are the investigation on the layout and the institutional operation, the effectivness of deliberative processes and the relations that take place in a conjucture of power sharing between public Power and the civil society. The metodologic approach is qualitative, gathering documental data and collecting semi-structured interviews. The democratic partici-pation phenomenum in Brazil, especially by the means of several participative institutions that were created since the country\'s redemocratization, has generated a wide field of empirical researches that base the democracy as an argumentative deliberation process and aim to evalu-ate gains and difficulties on that path. From this perspective, the results produced whithin a few decades of operations of the participatory institutions gain the centrality of the research agenda in this area, which seeks to measure its ability to turn the relations between public sector and civil society more democratic. For our research, we did the analysis of direct and indirect data gathered on the CMERP - legislation, the minutes of meetings (ordinary and extraordinary), the Ribeirão Preto\'s Educational Municipal Plan, the interviews with advisors and counselors and the field notes. We can say that the Council is in operation and fulfills its legal atributions. The institution has a participation thar markedly fiscalizes do Public Power and educational public policies, with concentrated representation in the fields of municipal education, in special the teachers. Among the challenges in terms of democratic expansion, are the approaching of civil society and the diversification of sectors represented internally.

Cortes e sociedade civil na América Latina estão em transformação, assim como a sua relação. Casos de grande repercussão social, decisões judiciais que incidem sobre políticas públicas, concentração de efeitos das sentenças, mecanismos de deliberação dentro dos processos são fenômenos relacionados a essas transformações. A tese deste trabalho é de que tanto o desenho institucional das cortes influencia a mobilização social jurídica, quanto a presença de uma forte mobilização social em torno das cortes pode influenciar não só a sua agenda de casos, mas também o seu desenho institucional. E esta relação precisa ser estudada de modo dinâmico e funcional. Para tanto, foram realizadas entrevistas com organizações não governamentais, think tanks, acadêmicos, magistrados e agência financiadora na Argentina, Brasil e Colômbia. É a narrativa comparada desses atores que oferece as variáveis de desenho institucional e mobilização social jurídica relevantes para compreender essas transformações. O trabalho, por fim, aponta para a necessidade de reformulação das agendas dos atores envolvidos sobre como pensar a inter-relação entre cortes e sociedade civil, tanto em termos de experimentação prática, imaginação institucional, desafios teóricos e de legitimação. / Courts and civil society in Latin America are under transformation, as well as the relationship between them. Cases of great social repercussion, judicial decisions which affect public policies, concentration effects of judgments, deliberation mechanisms within the processes are phenomena related to these changes. The thesis of this work is that both the institutional design of the courts affect social legal mobilization and the presence of strong social mobilization around the courts can influence not only their cases agenda, but also its institutional design. This relationship needs to be studied in a dynamic and functional way. To this end, interviews were conducted with nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, scholars, judges and funding agencies in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. It is the compared narrative of these actors that offers the \"variables\" of institutional design and of legal and social mobilization that are relevant to understand these changes. The thesis finally points to the need to reform the agendas of the actors involved on the reflections about the interplay between courts and civil society, in terms of practical experimentation, institutional imagination, theoretical challenges and legitimation.

The patent system has developed over a period of over 500 years. The initial motivation was a desire to import privately held technology to advance economic development, offering excluding and transferrable rights through licensing to “inventors” for the disclosure and perfection of their “contrivance” (invention). These rights have gradually developed to internationally accepted private property rights on technology and are today in many wayssimilar to physical assets, establishing, since 1883, the basis for an international system for trade in technology in its own rights. The thesis is a dual study of contract and mechanism design for experimental trading with patents. Experimental economics is used as a method to gather data on behavior, varying environmental and institutional parameters. An informal price theory is developed and tested. The experimental research adds to the static analysis literature by using a dynamic analysis in a behaviorally rich experimental system of specialized agents and competitive demand-side bidding on a linear contract, the “patent product.” The microeconomic system has primary and secondary markets, traders, and a linear contract on patents with limitedvalidity and uncertain values. The main results show that risks are shifted away from invention to innovation through demand-side bidding, including traders, creating incentives for increased technologycompetition and economic growth. When a linear contract – fixed fee plus royalty – is used totrade the patents, the fixed fee approaches the blocking value of the patent, in support of theproposed price theory (blocking formally similar to insurance). Such shift in risk bearing maybe beneficial for developing nations in leveraging their human capital through education andincreasing global market access through the patent system. The competitive bidding increasesthe dynamic market efficiency considerably, clearly indicating the dynamic value of the patentsystem. Market efficiency is however still low compared to other typical auction markets,suggesting further experiments to increase efficiency before it will be possible to provide helpful advice about what to do in the field. Dynamic gains increase with increased demandsidebidding and high patent validity. Tentative policy proposals are made for patent,development and innovation policy. The experiments have been carried out at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, George Mason University, USA. / QC 20100813