Rational Choice Analysis Research Articles

How Bumble-Bees Fly: Accounting for Public Interest Participation

This paper confirms the existence of public interest groups as a theoretical puzzle for an Olson type (economically-driven) rational choice explanation. It systematically reviews different theoretical approaches that challenge this appearance of paradox. The paper also introduces some British survey data. It concludes that rational choice analysis must subsume non-material incentives, but shows that discussions predicated on conceptions of rationality other than that used by Olson do not imply that participation is a problem to be explained. It also points to the importance of group activity in shaping the preferences of potential members and in stimulating membership.

RATIONAL CHOICE, PUBLIC POLICY AND AIDS

Rational choice theory is a controversial basis for institutional design. Dire warnings have been issued about its potential effects. This paper examines in detail a single example of rational-choice-based institutional design in light of these warnings. The conclusions are that these warnings are ill-founded because they are based on an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of rational choice analysis, that rational choice can serve as a basis for effective and humane institutional design, and that rational choice has features that make it suitable for policy analysis.

The Welfare State as Rational Choice: Social Democracy in a Post‐Socialist World

In this article* it is argued that rational choice analysis can help explain social democratic welfare states (SDWS). It explores the common ground between the methodological individualism of rational choice political economy and the “U‐shaped curve” central to neocorporatist analysis, the idea of a curvilinear relationship between the level of corporatism in institutional arrangements and societal welfare. Central to the SDWS, it is suggested, is the reduction of information costs due to the configuration of institutional arragements in three key arenas of social action in the SDWS: the informational‐cultural; the organizational‐economic; and the governmental‐political. These arrangements frame the choices under which rational individuals act to maintain the SDWS and the outcomes it produces. Concrete examples demonstrating the usefulness of the approach are offered in terms of explaining differences in policy choices (and therefore outcomes) between the Scandinavian countries and more laissez‐faire systems such as the US. The conclusion looks at the prospects for the SDWS, asking just how the institutional arrangements central to the SDWS are being challenged by recent developments.

Culture and Preferences in the International Cooperation Two-Step

Rational choice analyses of international cooperation have slighted the effect of state preference formation and the influence of cultural forces in that process. This article addresses these gaps by developing an explanation that specifies howorganizational culturesof bureaucracies shape state aims and international outcomes. This approach is evaluated in a set of least likely cases—decisions on the use of force in war—where the conventional wisdom expects external material, not internal cultural, concerns to dominate. Before World War II, countries agreed to limit the use of three types of warfare, but during that conflict mutual restraint was maintained in only one. I show how this variation is best understood as a product of state preference dynamics, shaped largely by the collective beliefs and customs of military services. This result suggests ways to rethink the use of the preferences-interaction model and the role of cultural factors in that framework.

Motivational Orientation and the Nature of Consensual Decision Processes: A Triangulated Approach

Area specialists have observed that one way elite decision processes can vary is in the proportion of the decision-making group seen as necessary to support group action: decision-makers can aim for consensus, or they can aim for less inclusive support. Is this distinction of theoretical sig nificance ? I argue that it is through an examination of three sources: (1) rational-choice analyses of unanimity and majority rules; (2) social psy chological studies of the effects of these rules in the laboratory; and (3) descriptions of dispute resolution processes as these appear in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and American fiction. These sources indicate that con sensual decision processes tend either to inhibit collective action, induce cognitive effort and commitment, or promote particular definitions of issues depending on the motivational orientation of decision-makers-on whether they are interest-maximizers, information-processors, or social beings. This conclusion, I argue, has broad implications for the study of elite decision making.

The End of Political Science? Rational Choice Analyses in Studies of Japanese Politics

The End of Political Science? Rational Choice Analyses in Studies of Japanese Politics

Institutionalism, Rational Choice, and Historical Analysis

Institutions do not fall from the sky. Neither do so-called rational actors. Both institutions and individuals are historical phenomena; if we wish to understand them, we must see where they come from and why they develop as they do. The New Institutionalism was born when a group of social scientists decided they wanted to construct a new way of understanding American politics. According to Ira Katznelson, who was present at the creation and explained its origins in an excellent essay published last year in Social Research, they set out to establish what Katznelson calls a new paradigm for political analysis. They were able to proceed in part because of grants from the Social Science Research Council.' In short, particular people, operating at a particular historical moment, with particular ideas, and funding from particular sources, were able to create their own informal institution, which we now call the New Institutionalism. These individuals developed what Theda Skocpol would call organizational linkages, thanks in part to their access to resources. I think it is fair to say that they have enjoyed, to use her phrase, some sense of success over time.

The New Political Economy

Political economy has been an extremely diverse field of study, embracing a large number of different approaches and methodologies. The fading of old ideological and methodological disputes and the development of new intellectual agendas in response to far-reaching changes in the economic and political structures of the world system have created the possibility of a new political economy which promises a reconstruction of the field and the overcoming of the methodological division between economics and political science. Recent critiques of established literatures in international political economy, state theory, comparative government-industry relations, and public choice are contributing to a new paradigm. Drawing on recent developments in economics such as New Keynesianism it combines the historical and institutionalist analysis of structure with rational choice analysis of agency.

INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS

The field of intergovernmental relations has been strongly affected by the considerable processes of upheaval and change that have been experienced within the British system of central‐local relations. Researchers have tried to understand these changes both at an empirical and theoretical level.This article reviews four of the main perspectives on the changing nature of intergovernmental relations. The first perspective provides a historical and institutional analysis within the tradition of public administration. The second perspective draws on organizational theory. The third develops insights through rational choice analysis. The final perspective draws on neo‐Marxist influenced state theory. It can be concluded that in a search to understand the turmoil of recent years, students of intergovernmental relations have ranged far and wide in their theoretical concerns. The article closes with an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

Learning for Life: Education for an Economically Competitive and Socially Responsible North America

covered to some extent by Linda Trimble's finely researched piece on the politics of gender in Alberta and to a lesser extent by Tom Flanagan's use of rational choice analysis to discuss the tragic dispute of the Lubicon Cree with the provincial and federal government. However, the environmental movement, which has shown surprising vigour in Alberta is all but ignored. Finally, Jack Masson provides a sound analysis of a frequently neglected topic, the relations between the provincial and municipal governments. Given the record of one party dominance in Alberta, Fred Engelmann probably had the most difficult task analysing their devastating effects on the Alberta legislature, a body which has historically existed in a near comatose state. While the book suffers from the oc-

A Model of the Political Economy of the United States

We develop and test a model of joint determination of economic growth and national election results in the United States. The formal model, which combines developments in the rational choice analysis of the behavior of economic agents and voters, leads to a system of equations in which the dependent variables are the growth rate and the vote shares in presidential and congressional elections. Our estimates support the theoretical claims that growth responds to unanticipated policy shifts and that voters use both on-year and midterm elections to balance the two parties. On the other hand, we find no support for “rational” retrospective voting. We do reconfirm, in a fully simultaneous framework, the “naive” retrospective voting literature's finding that the economy has a strong effect on presidential voting. We find congressional elections unaffected by the economy, except as transmitted by presidential coattails.

Rational Choice and the Limits of Theoretical Generality

Claims that rational choice analysis represents a general theory of social processes raise questions not only about rational choice but about the very idea of theoretical generality. Logically, a truly general theory ought to offer analytical means to all legitimate ends of social inquiry. This article holds, however, that no theory based on any single genre of social processes (rational calculation included) can serve the full range of descriptive or explanatory purposes properly addressed by sociologists. Rational choice thinking, like other claimants to the status of theoretical generality, misleads when its proponents doggedly insist on posing accounts invoking rational calculation to explain outcomes where other social processes are actually crucial. Acknowledgment of this fact can be expected to lead to the qualifications and amendments identified by Smelser as “theoretical degeneration.”

The Politics of Job Loss

This paper undertakes a rational choice analysis of a problem in political economy: namely, why trade unions, confronted with firms equally intransigent in their commitments to work-force reductions, sometimes actively resist job loss and at other times passively acquiesce. Cases investigated are British Leyland and Fiat. Unions at British Leyland acquiesced, whereas those at Fiat resisted mass work-force reductions in 1980. The literatures on corporatism and on contemporary industrial relations both class Italian and British labor relations as antagonistic. They thereby fail to anticipate the different outcomes for these two cases. The outcomes may be understood as products of the rational calculations that union leaders make within the constraints of labor market institutions. Specifically, I show that union responses to the threat of large-scale work-force reductions vary with the presence or absence of seniority-based mechanisms for allocating job loss. Where seniority is used, the union acquiesces in job loss, since seniority effectively protects the union's own shop stewards. Where, conversely, the firm enjoys discretion in selecting workers for job loss, the union may resist if it believes the selection will be discriminatory, hence threatening its own shop floor organization.

A Rational Choice Analysis of Union Militancy with Application to the Cases of British Coal and Fiat.

A Rational Choice Analysis of Union Militancy with Application to the Cases of British Coal and Fiat.

Book Review: Labor-Management Relations: A Rational Choice Analysis of Union Militancy with Application to the Cases of British Coal and Fiat

Book Review: Labor-Management Relations: A Rational Choice Analysis of Union Militancy with Application to the Cases of British Coal and Fiat

Industrial Capitalism and the Welfare of the State: The Role of Employers in the Comparative Development of Welfare States. A Review of Recent Research

Recent debates on the future of social benefits in the market economy have focussed attention on the origins of state services and the conditions which encouraged the growth of public welfare in modern society. The emphasis in the recent writing has been upon the political conditions for the evolution of citizenship rather than on economic and industrialisation models of welfare expenditure. At the same time there have been various attempts to adapt and refine the rational choice analysis of public goods to explain individual support for collective services. Each of these approaches has been developed with a strong interest in the historical and comparative analysis of welfare provision. This essay reviews recent research and the definitions of economic and political power which are employed. Many writers stress the continuities of traditional institutions at the expense of recurring economic and political conflict which defined the practical boundaries of citizenship. An alternative view of capitalist prerogatives is outlined. Taking the particular example of industrial capitalism and social insurance in Britain, it is argued that the social policies of the state formed part of a wider political settlement at key moments of development. In this process we can trace the significance of discursive struggles as well as economic structures and state initiatives. Such an approach reveals the complexity of political processes and the limits of comparative studies which focus primarily on economic or state structures.

Rational Fools or Foolish Rationalists?: Bringing Meaning Back In

Weber connected intentionality to interpretation. The concept of attribution links his conception of cultural sciences to his definition of culture.' He conceived of means-end rationality as a possible of action (Weber 1922). Contemporary rational choice analysts in sociology have had less to say about meaning, or about methodological issues raised by the imputation of subjective (Boudon 1977, 1979; Corsi 1981; Elster 1978, 1979, 1982; Heckathorn 1988; Rusconi 1984; Szaniawsky 1979). The possibility of interpretation within a specifically sociological frame of reference, the traditional problem of sociological interpretation, is nevertheless raised anew by the program of rational choice analysis. The program is ultimately dependent on the factual assumptions about the intentions and meanings that rational agents attach to their actions and the actions of others (Burns 1990; Sciolla and Ricolfi 1989). The mutual relevance of the two programs, however, has not been assessed clearly. The aim of this paper is to clarify these relations. Put differently, it is to reassess the Weberian lesson from a contemporary perspective. Imputing intentions-attributing content to actions-has a traditional place in sociological explanation (Cicourel 1964, 1973; Harre and Secord 1972; Parsons and Shils 1951; C. Taylor 1964; R. Taylor 1966; von Wright 1971). For Weber and the interpretive sociologists, imputations of intentions or (more generally) the bestowal of on actions is a means to, or a part of, the explanation of a phenomenon constituted as an object of knowledge through the principle of value relevance. Verstehende sociology is characterized by the explicit theoretical linking of the phenomenon of interest to agents' bestowals of meaning. Meaning bestowal (or intention formation) is considered as one of the conditions for (the possibility of) the empirical occurrence of a particular course of action. For Weber, the theoretical construction of action was achieved through the ideal types of traditional, affectual, means-end rational, and value-rational action (1922). The kind of meaning relevant for the sociological interpreter is that which bears on the interpreter's sociological purposes as defined by his or her theoretical framework. No model of man (Simon 1957) is required, any more than access to true or objective is required. What is needed is an account of the context of social action, a theory of the conditions under which action becomes

The Utility of Bilingualism

This article proposes an analytical model of linguistic behavior in a bilingual community. The starting point is the assumption that conversation is an interaction among individuals to which rational choice analysis can be applied. Two attitudes—adaptive and nonadaptive—are defined. Using game theory, five types of linguistic behavior are established as a result of the different combinations of persons with adaptive attitudes and nonadaptive attitudes in conversation groups. The results of each linguistic behavior are evaluated for their effect on the promotion of any language. Likewise, the individual and collective utility of each linguistic behavior is calculated, introducing the concept of disutility of use of the second language. Finally, the most effective behaviors for the promotion of the majority language—a goal which seems to be pursued in many countries—are compared with the behaviors which bring about greater utility for individuals and the community.

Imperfectly rational choice: Rationality as the result of a costly activity

In identifying characteristics of people and of their choices that determine their degree of rationality — the nature and incidence of imperfect rationality — this paper suggests that there are often observable criteria by which to judge the applicability of the rational choice model to a particular market or choice situation. Clearer understanding will cut both ways, bringing more of non-economic behavior into the productive domain of rational choice analysis while at the same time showing economic, and non-economic, behavior that is badly modeled by the assumption of rational decision makers.

Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa

This book addresses several of the classic questions in African Studies. In the pre-colonial era what were the sources of order in societies without states? And what were the origins of 'traditional' states in Africa? In the colonial period, what caused the divergent patterns of agricultural development? And what were the issues that drove the peasantry into the rebellions which brought an end to colonial rule? Since independence what has been the fate of the African peasantry? What has been the content of the agricultural policies adopted by the governments of Africa? And how can these policies be accounted for? In answering these questions, the book explores various forms of explanation and advances a form of political economy based upon rational-choice analysis.