Bounded Rationality and Political Science: Lessons from Public Administration and Public Policy

Abstract

By 1958, a model of human behavior capable of serving as the microlevel foundation for organizational and policy studies was in place. The scientific soundness of that model is unquestioned, yet the fundamentals of that behavioral model of choice have not yet been incorporated into political science. Much analysis relies on models of rational maximization despite the availability of a more scientifically sound behavioral base. In this article I examine the reasons for and ramifications of this neglect of sound science in political science, focusing primarily on public policy and public administration. While neither approach can lay claim to major successes in prediction, the behavioral model of choice predicts distributions of organizational and policy outputs in a superior fashion. Most people who study politics and government care little about the fine details of the specifics of human cognition; they are quite content to leave that to biologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. What they cannot escape, however, is the need for some firm foundation that can link human behavior to macropolitics. That foundation must fulfill three criteria: First, it must do no harm (it should not mislead); second, it must allow movement between individual-level processes and organizational processes in a more or less seamless manner; and third, it should be efficient in that it does not drag in specifics of human behavior that are not needed to understand the policy-making process. I will show how the model of bounded rationality, as initially articulated by Herbert A. Simon, a political scientist, (and then expanded by Simon, organizational theorists such as James A. March, and cognitive scientists such as Allen Newell) fulfills these criteria. This foundation has been available since 1958. 1 I will show that the common alternative assumption, comprehensive rationality, fails to produce satisfactory scientific predictability and that bounded rationality is a superior mechanism. It is superior in two respects: It performs better in linking the procedures of human choice with the organizational and policy processes, and it performs better in predicting organizational and policy outcomes in a very important class of collective behaviors. Neither approach does very well in “point prediction” (predicting precise events), but bounded rationality makes distributional predictions in