IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-62006-3_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Learning and Imitation by Theocracies

In: The Political Economy of Theocracy

Author

Listed:
  • Amihai Glazer

Abstract

A fruitful approach in the analysis of democracy is to view each voter as aiming to maximize his utility, and candidates who want to maximize the chances of winning election. These assumptions form the basis of the Downsian model. In contrast, a dictator can be viewed as maximizing power (see Wintrobe, 1998). Ideological regimes, such as perhaps some communist ones, may aim to maximize the number of people believing in its ideology (see Bernholz, 2001). This view may accord with our view of some theocracies. But theocracy may involve more than substituting one objective for another. True believers, for example, may want to do God’s will, fearing great punishment if they do not.

Suggested Citation

  • Amihai Glazer, 2009. "Learning and Imitation by Theocracies," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Mario Ferrero & Ronald Wintrobe (ed.), The Political Economy of Theocracy, chapter 9, pages 203-211, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62006-3_10
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230620063_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-62006-3_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.