Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science

As a graduate student in political science, I was assigned this book for the Scope and Methods seminar. In the interest of full disclosure, I do consider myself a proponent of the rational choice model as a sound and well-articulated baseline from which to formulate clear social science theory but am by no means an all-out Kool Aid-drinker who worships Riker, McKelvey, Shepsle, etc. Instead, my allegiance to the RC school of thought stems from the problem that is epitomized by this book; by this I mean that for all the sound and fury that we've seen unleashed against RC from the proponents of the utterly ill-defined and atheoretical "political culture" school of thought, RC's critics haven't even come close to offering up a competiting framework from whcih to build social science theories or conduct social science inquiry. By obsessively focusing on "empirical performance" of RC-based theories, Green and Shapiro miss the larger point of what RC is supposed to accomplish. In fairness, however, their misplaced "empirical performance" argument against RC is given credibility by the willingness of people like Krehbiel, Cox and McCubbins to actually accept the terms of Green and Shapiro's hollow criticism. In any case, for a more thorough and damning assessment of this book, I refer readers to this review: [...]

The authors are correct that rational choice theory is flawed and limited in its ability to explain voter and legislator behavior.However,they do not use the best sources available to critique this approach.They needed to (a)clearly cover the founding father of rational choice theory,Jeremy Bentham, as it pertains to the political process, voting,and legislative decision making,in much greater depth,as well as to (b) demonstrate the general defects in the information and knowledge assumptions of Benthamite Utilitarianism that were implicitly pointed out by J M Keynes in his A Treatise on Probability (1921;TP) regarding voters who are faced with the problems of conflicting information,uncertainty ,and ignorance in attempting to make political choices when voting . The authors attempt to cover Jeremy Bentham in a few sentences in their book.They seem to be aware that rational choice theory was started by Bentham,but seem to be unaware of the great influence Bentham has,either directly or indirectly,in this area.Bentham rejected any political theory based on concepts of " natural law " or " natural rights ".For instance,Bentham viewed the American Declaration of Independence as total and complete nonsense.Instead,he sought to replace this with his concept of utility ,combined with his claims that all decision makers are able to figure the odds (calculate the risk)involved in a set of alternative choices and choose the optimal one that will maximize their expected utility.Bentham's arguments are all laid out carefully in his 1789 book, " Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation ".Bentham is very clear that his utility maximizing approach is also to be explicitly applied in the political arena where voters political preferences and legislator's political preferences take the place of the economic preferences of rational economic man.Bentham's operating motto, " the greatest good for the greatest number ",demonstrates a bias for pure democracy,as opposed to the American republican form of democracy that seeks to prevent the tyranny of the majority.It finds its expression in the goal of maximizing a Social Welfare Function representing social preferences.Two of Arrow's five axioms(Arrow showed that there is no social preference function that would,in general, satisfy all 5 of his axioms), the complete ordering of all social preferences and the independence of irrelevant alternatives,can only exist under information assumptions that require that the weight of the evidence,w,is equal to 1 where w is defined on the unit interval from 0 to 1.This same problem also limits the applicablity of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) theory in purely economic decision making.J M Keynes developed the weight of the evidence index in the TP to measure the reliabilty and/or completeness of the evidence supporting a probability estimate.Bentham's calculus of decision making requires a w=1 .This would mean that there is no uncertainty ,ignorance,or ambiguity facing the voter/politician.Each voter or politician could calculate the risks of voting for different political positions and maximize his utility. Political decision making and voting involves decision making under conditions of conflicting evidence ,first emphasized by Keynes in chapter III of the TP,and incomplete,ambiguous,unclear,uncertain knowledge and information.This essentially leads to the argument that voters and legislators seek a satisfactory,half of a loaf, political outcome only.The existing system of lobbying,compromising and vote trading by legislators in order to pass legislation was ,in fact, exactly the type of behavior that the founding fathers envisioned taking place in the political arena.The rational choice approach is a special case with limited applicability in economics, social science,political theory,politics,etc.

So far so good

still one of the best and most useful works in political science, regardless of how you feel about positivism