Chapter three
Chapter three
Rational Choice
Introduction
Introduction
The rational choice approach to the study of politics involves the application of the methods of economics to the study of politics. We say more about this in the following section, but two key assumptions which are of absolutely central importance to rational choice can be immediately highlighted: rationality and self-interest. No matter what aspect of politics they are looking at and no matter whose behaviour they are seeking to account for, rational choice theorists, with some exceptions discussed below, start by assuming that people can be relied upon to act in ways which best secure their goals and that these goals reflect their self-interest.
The plausibility of these assumptions can be challenged. But their utility cannot be doubted because if people are rational and self-interested it is possible to construct simple but potentially powerful explanations about political events. Rational choice theorists often assemble dizzyingly complex models of political behaviour replete with equations and mathematical appendices. But the explanatory work being done by the assumptions of self-interest and rationality is nevertheless easy to grasp. Why did government ministers cut taxes shortly before an election? The rational choice theorist will be at one with the cynical voter in suggesting that the government cut taxes in order to boost its own chances of re-election and did so in the belief that voters reward governments who can deliver the appearance of prosperity.
Rational choice theorists were not the first to employ the assumptions of rationality and self-interest. A 'realist' tradition within international relations tracing its origins back to ancient Greece and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War suggests (at its simplest) that states' actions are explicable in terms of a self-interested drive for power and that their leaders' commitments to justice, peaceful co-existence and international norms of behaviour are 'cheap talk'. Since the nineteen eighties it is, however, rational choice theorists who have most zealously applied the assumptions of rationality and self-interest to the broadest range of political activities.
Rational choice theory was developed by a small number of economists and political scientists working in a handful of American universities in the nineteen sixties. Having initially been confined to the pages of economics journals, rational choice entered the political science mainstream in the early nineteen eighties and, for a time, looked like it might dominate the study of politics. Indeed, during this period rational choice grew in popularity to such an extent that it acquired a number of different names: rational choice theory; rational action theory; public choice theory (which its proponents regarded as a more specialized version of rational choice theory dealing specifically with the behaviour of governments); and social choice theory (a subset of rational choice theory which examines the properties of voting systems and the possibilities of aggregating individual preferences to form a social choice). One leading proponent, Dennis Mueller, went so far as to predict that 'rational choice and political science will be indistinguishable in another generation'; and that rational choice 'will be a field within economics, and will encompass all of political science'. This has not come to pass. Rather than rolling over and learning to think like rational choice theorists, many political scientists reacted to the arrival of rational choice by criticizing the shallowness of its assumptions, its political biases and poor predictive record. Economics and politics, they argued, are very different spheres of human activity. Methods that might work for economics will not necessarily work for politics.
In recent years the intensity of the argument over rational choice has started to dissipate. Rational choice theory no longer divides the discipline in quite the same way as it once did. One reason why is that rational choice theorists have, in practice, learnt how to relax and so make more palatable some of the assumptions they make. Increasingly, some of the most interesting work in political science does not consist of passionate defences of or attacks upon rational choice theory but, instead, exercises in theoretical 'border crossing' in which rational choice assumptions and arguments are deployed within and alongside other theoretical approaches.
In this chapter we start by describing in more detail what the rational choice method consists of. To show what this method looks like and how, in practice, some of its assumptions can be softened and blended with other theoretical approaches we then look at the concept of collective action problems in relation to environmental politics. We conclude by listing some of the more salient criticisms which have been made of the rational choice approach and discuss how rational choice theorists have responded to them.