Metamorphic Moment of the Indian Polity: Anatomizing the Evolution and Changing Dynamics of the Indian State against the Protean Nature of Cooperative Federalism

The elusive and paradoxical nature of Indian polity has been evident in the amalgamation of Western patterns of bureaucratic organization, participatory politics with indigenous practices and institutional framework that had an organic growth on the Indian soil. While post-colonial India was characterized by the incorporation of democratic political ethos and structural architecture, Westminster model of parliamentary government and representative legal institutions, it did not imply the exact replication of the British architectonic system of advanced industrial democracy. As the Indian political process is subjected to dramatic transmutations and cyclical changes, it has eventually acquired a mass character and vibrancy with the exuberant participation of marginalized and underprivileged political formations and social groups in the political arena, coupled with the regionalization of the polity, altering the terms of political domination and sowing the seeds of an increasingly complex mechanism of negotiation, competitive bargaining, alliance and coalition-building, in a cooperative federalist arrangement. The principle objective of this paper is to put an emphasis on the role of the Indian state, the transformation of Indian federalism and the political process, while holistically encapsulating the development and multidimensional patterns associated with the Indian political system, tracing the departure from the heyday of the Congress system and Nehruvian civic nationalism to the crystallization of a majoritarian edifice, propelled by Hindu Nationalism.

Climate Change Sustainability: From Bargaining to Cooperative Balanced Approach

This work aims to provide different perspectives on the relationships between cooperative game theory and the research field concerning climate change dynamics. New results are obtained in the framework of competitive bargaining solutions and related issues, moving from a cooperative approach to a competitive one. Furthermore, the dynamics of balanced and super-balanced games are exposed, with particular reference to coalitions. Some open problems are presented to aid future research in this area.

How Married Couples Make Charitable Giving Decisions

This research note reports the results of interviews with 29 married couples about how they make charitable giving decisions. Most couples in the sample made decisions about donating small amounts separately and large amounts jointly. Most couples engaged in cooperative, not competitive, bargaining, as they tended to support the same charities and rarely disagreed about giving decisions. When couples did disagree, it was usually about the amount given, not the target, for large donations, and the target, not the amount given, for small ones. Sometimes one partner would act as the “gas pedal” and tend to want to donate money, while their spouse would act as the “brakes” and argue in favor of making a smaller donation or no donation. Cooperative bargaining also marked the process of increasing a donation, as one spouse would make a small initial decision and would later consult with the other about increasing the amount.

Competitive Communication Among Women

According to many communication scholars, aggression is a consequence of sociocultural experiences and less often considered an evolved response to environmental triggers. While there are many factors of aggression, an evolutionary rationale helps to isolate which of these factors are more crucial in explaining aggression among women, one of which is physical attractiveness. Far from superficial, attractive women enjoy better bargaining positions during intrasexual competition than those less attractive, and aggress to negotiate better treatment from rivals. However, evidence of this is mixed because women exaggerate their physical attractiveness during times of heightened ovulatory fertility. Consequently, women’s competitive bargaining positions are based on the interplay between everyday attractiveness and their exaggerations of physical attractiveness. In comparison to traditional social psychology and communication models of aggression, human evolution more parsimoniously explains the ways women functionally match their communication of aggression to many environmental triggers and individual differences between competitors.