The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (270 page)

A series of repetitions of the same game between (among) the same players. Especially in
prisoners' dilemma
and chicken games, the supergame is important because it may (but need not) result in the co-operative equilibrium that rational players fail to reach in the single-shot (one-off) game. A well-known application of the prisoner's dilemma supergame is R. Axelrod ,
The Evolution of Co-operation
(1984). Axelrod suggests that such phenomena as the live-and-let-live agreement between Allied and German troops on the Western Front in the First World War, and some forms of co-operation among animals, may be regarded as supergame equilibria.

 
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See
base/superstructure
.

 
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The side of an economy which determines how many goods are supplied at any given price. The supply side interacts with the demand side to produce an exact price and quantity at which the market exactly clears, with neither shortages of goods nor unplanned surpluses of them. (Neo)classical economists believe that most markets do clear in practice if the right political institutions exist; other schools including Keynesians and Marxists disagree. The label ‘supplyside policies’ applied to some policies of right-wing administrations in the 1980s refers to policies designed to make markets less sticky and more liable to clear. For instance, neoclassicists argue that the market for labour is often sticky because institutions such as national wage bargaining and statutory minimum wages prevent some bargains from being struck which, left to themselves, a worker with low earning potential and an employer seeking such a worker would strike. ‘Loosening the supply side’ means removing restrictions of this sort. Those who are opposed to it politically call it by less neutral names.

 
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A final court of appeal. The best-known example is the United States Supreme Court; there are also American state supreme courts, although in some cases they are named differently. Article III of the US Constitution provides for a supreme court at the apex of the federal judiciary while leaving to Congress the establishment of lower federal courts. The number of US Supreme Court justices has varied between five and ten, but has remained at nine since 1869. Justices are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. These are lifetime appointments subject to good behaviour. Only one Supreme Court judge has ever been impeached, and he was acquitted, in 1805. The
original jurisdiction
of the Court is very narrow in scope and it operates almost entirely as a court of appeal. Principally through its exercise of
judicial review
the Supreme Court, from time to time, appears to assume great power and to become effectively a maker of public policy. However, the Court is also constrained by the checks and balances of the Constitution. Thus the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is determined by act of Congress, as is the structure of the federal judiciary and the number of federal judges. The Court has no means of enforcing its decisions. As Alexander
Hamilton
observed in
The
Federalist
, no. 78, the federal judiciary is the ‘least dangerous’ branch, possessing ‘neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm for the efficacy of its judgments’.
In the United Kingdom the phrase has a distinctive and misleading meaning. The court of final appeal (supreme court in the general sense) is the
House of Lords
in its judicial capacity; but the Supreme Court as defined by the Judicature Act 1873 comprises the High Court and the Court of Appeal.
DM 

 
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Until the creation of the Congress of People's Deputies, the Supreme Soviet was formally the highest legislative body in the Soviet state. In practice, it was a merely symbolic institution until democratization in 1989, at which time it became a forum for serious debate and a check on government activity.
SW 

 
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