Rationality in Political Behavior

Abstract

Public choice theory borrows the basic assumptions of neoclassical economics about the nature of human rationality and applies them to the explanation and prediction of behavior in the political domain (Downs, 1957). An attractive, and seductive, feature of the theory is a very strong rationality assumption (maximization of subjective expected utility) that appears to permit a great deal of explanation and prediction without the painful necessity of first constructing an empirically based theory of human behavior, in particular, a theory of the nature and limits of human rationality. To an important extent, deductive reasoning from the theory's basic postulates of rationality substitutes for a great deal of costly empirical inquiry. The frequent use of public choice theory today in political science calls for an examination of the assumptions of rationality that the theory employs. This paper carries out such an examination. The analysis focuses on three issues: the nature of the rationality assumption, the orthogonality of rationality and selfishness, and the possibility of altruism. Our inquiry will lead us to the conclusion that human rationality is much more complex than it is portrayed to be in neoclassical and public choice theories, and that much less can be derived by deductive means from the (amended) assumptions of rationality than has been supposed by the exponents of those theories. An important corollary to this conclusion is that a veridical theory of public choice requires a solid foundation of empirical fact about the nature of human goals and about the processes that people use in reasoning from their actions to their values.