L1: What is rational choice

What is Rational Choice?

Is not just one theory, it is basically a whole set of theories surrounding a few basic (but very controversial) assumptions

Aka a lens

Rational choice consensus?

NO consensus

The debate about the limitations of this theory is often not friendly → hate

Rational choice theory

refers to the school of thought that thinks about how any individual is most likely to make decisions

• it claims to be able to explain how all decisions are made across all individuals

• It is a framework of analyzing decisions

RC: deductive reasoning

• Always starts with certain assumptions —> start with set of prior assumptions

  • What people/groups want 

• Make general models based on these common assumptions

• Models very clear before starting

  • Ex. Political parties want to be in parliament

• With models we predict individual and group behavior

are the models used in RC realistic?

• Not all models fit reality

  • Not everyone thinks the same way

    • Ex. Not all politicians are after the same thing

Models with real life information

• Models are based on these a priori assumptions

• They are abstractions (or simplifications) of the political world

• We test the implications of these rational choice models with real life information

  • If assumptions don’t match up with reality, the model is wrong and needs to be modified

PolSci History: end of WW2

• Thick descriptions

  • Summary of how institutions worked plus focus on their historical development

• Normative component: many judgement were made about how they worked

  • Judgements were not really motivated

    • Why do things work/happen the way they are

• PolSci was descriptive and judgmental (“how questions”) rather than analytical (the "why" question)

PolSci history: 50s - 70s

• Behavioralism

  • Can we move towards a more 'objective' approach?

  • It emphasized an objective, quantified approach to explain and predict political behavior - the 'why' questions

• Started to systematically collect information and find empirical regularities (inductive reasoning)

• The start of 'logical positivism'

  • Logical positivism = Measure something through data collection

    • Patterns, why? 

  • Economic imperialism

PolSci History: 70s - 1994

the take-off growth

• The combination of economic models and PolSci lead to RC

• RC became attractive to many scholars from different fields

• Many books & journal articles, journals were written

  • Around 90s: more than 40% of the articles published in APSR based on RC

  • Now? 80%

    • Have some ideas of RC in them —> not all are explicitly RC

PolSci history: 70s - 1994 problem started

• One important finding: RC scholars showed that state intervention in the market could expect to fail

• This in contrast to many economist findings that were in favor for state intervention to balance out market failure

• RC scholars were often used by neo-liberal (right) politicians

• Created a lot of hostilities between RC scholars and other political scientists!

PolSci history: 1994-2004

Difficulties arise — blew up in 1994 with Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory book

• Their main claim was that RCT has not yielded empirically useful results

• Criticism: can’t predict everyone’s behavior —> reality is more complicated

• Attacked RC in every way possible

Pathologies

• uproar with book was connected to its confrontational tone more than its substance

• The reaction of rational choice scholars was to get hostile and mean back

• Empiricism ≠ RC ≠ formal mathematical modeling

• Scholars started to change their models to better fit reality

RC in current scholarship

• RC has not swallowed PolSci as a whole but it has definitely not disappeared

• It still shapes the PolSci research agenda

  • Especially in US

• RC also worked on a better defense against criticisms

  • RC responded initially with several papers, journals, articles that attacked Green and Shapiro

  • It has become more empirical, interdisciplinary

  • Some have even argued that RC has softened its assumptions

RC is often confused with what?

Logical positivism/empiricism

Mathematical logic

Two types of rational choice models

• soft

• Hard