Week 10.

Interaction and Confrontation bet. Area Studies and Disciplines –

The Rational Choice Theory?

I 34028 Sakhayaana I 31012 So Hee

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Preconception VS Observationor the Contribution of Rational Choice Theory and

Area Studies to Contemporary Political Science.

by Chalmers Johnson

Rational Choice Theory

• Ideological development accompanied the end of the Cold War.

• The attempt to apply neo-classical theory model of a market to politics.

• Maximize utility and profits, minimize outlay.

• Laissez faire

RCT's basic premises are

(1) Human beings base their behavior on rational calculations.

(2) They act with rationality when making choices.

(3) Their choices are aimed at optimization of their pleasure or profit.

Robert H. Bates

• Robert H. Bates is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on the political economy of development, particularly in Africa, and on violence and state failure.

• Outspoken fan of RCT.

Professor Bates as RC theorist and his attack on area studies

• ‘scientist’ ≠ non-Anglo-American research based scholars

• Area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge

• Area specialist are humanists• ‘defection’ – commitment to the study of “history,

languages and culture”• “I have long regarded area programs as a problem for

political science”

Two Ironies of the we-too-can-be-economist Fad in Political Science

1) RCT represents one of the last gasps of ‘modernism’.

2) RCT is occurring just as the model science, economics, is starting back away from its basic theory.

RCT on the concept of Culture

– Culture is particular society’s structure of values and how this interacts with its division of labor ©Thomas S. Kuhn

• RCT fails to understand the concept of culture that it repeatedly attacks.

• Ignores cultural development and change.• It puerile and appears merely to reflect the

particular narrowness of America culture.

Verstehen(understanding) Problem

• Area specialist → ‘gold miner’

• RC theorist → ‘master goldsmith’•

HOWEVER, RC theorist do not produce beautiful objects but junk and real area specialist have a much better record of producing theory.

Neo-classical economic theory

1) oversimplifies the dynamics of human motivation.

2) misunderstand that civil society needs political rights.

3) misprices the things• The model of the neoclassical market does not

recognize that state and market coexist symbiotically.

Conclusion

• Neither neoclassical economics nor RCT provides a mechanical alternative to genuine social science analysis, i.e. what political science but no other discipline of the social sciences calls area studies.

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The Disciplines of Political Science:Studying the Culture of Rational Choice

as a Case in Point

by Ian S. Lustick

Nomothetic view vs. Idiographic view

Nomothetic Idiographic

Scholarship Theory driven Area basedKnowledge-driven

Characteristic General, Whole Unique, Individual

Method Covering laws Direct immersion

But!• Some parts of nomothetic approach is based on “theories”.• Some parts of idiographic approach is based on

“understood but unexplained truths”.

4 Main Disciplines of Political Science

1) Rational choice and game theoretic formal modeling2) Eclectic neo-Weberian mid-range theory3) Thickly descriptive approach (in-depth study)4) Post modernist and post-structuralist treatments

Major Question

How “culture,” a necessary aspect of any “area study” project, might be studied by practitioners from each of the four approaches?

Rational Choice and Game Theoretic formal modeling

According to Bates,

• Cultures are distinguished by their distinctive institutions.• Game theories are advanced as specially designed tools to

analyze institutions.→ Then, game theory is designed to study cultures!

• Then, How might game theorists (rational theorists) suggest and find out answers about the culture of rational choice theory?

Game theo-ries Institutions Cultures

Rational Choice and Game Theoretic formal modeling

• Unit of analysis: Choice (among the distinctive institutions, histories, and understandings)

• The culture of rational choice theorists would be studied as the intended or unintended consequences of choices and as control on choice.

• The object is to suggest the problem of what kind of game, what sort of formal model of interactive rational decisions, what sort of information availability would logically produce patterns of behavior, attitude, and expectations similar to observed patterns to be judged satisfying by other rational choice theorists.

Mid-range theory• Neo-Gramscian theory of “wars of position.”• The school which Bates represents would be seen to achieve

complete domination of the discipline of political science.• If successful, “Politics would be reclothed as culture.” (Gramsci)• The object is to redefine, recategorize, reformulate discourses,

and establish working compromises with key rivals within the rich diversity of dominant culture.

• “Theory = Rational choice theory”“Game theoretic modeling = Political economy”“Mathmathics = important measure of competence”“Area Studies = not as an intellectual rival, but as a necessary complement to the social sciences

Thickly descriptive approach

• It was adopted by most area studies specialists.• Field research, so it requires a great deal of language

proficiency.• Aggregate-date researchers might wish to know

whether the congruence hypothesis applies to rational choice culture.

• This kind of research would produce data highly relevant to the general theoretical question of whether culture can be either chosen or given.

Post-modern approach

• Unit of Analysis: Practice• The observed practices of rational choice scholars

suggest quite obvious deconstructive possibilities.• The culture of the most “centered” and modernist of

all modern paradigms would be shown to summarize the de-centered post-modern moment.

Conclusion

• Collaborative Research Networks- International interconnected arrays of workshops, publications, conferences, and other projects from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspective (American Council of Learned Societies).

• Within the overall context of the CRN, a variety of within-paradigm and cross-paradigm activities is possible, focusing attention on similar substantive problems, no matter how differently characterized and probed.

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Rational Choice Analysis and Area Studies

Enemies or Partners?

by Margatet A. Mackean

Three Objectives of the article

(1) To suggest what rational choice analysis and some of its subdomains and branches include,

(2) To distinguish rational choice as an analytic paradigm from the full right-to left range of ideological views,

(3) To build methodically on these distinctions to understand the implications of rational choice analysis for scholars in area studies who seek to understand particular societies.

Origins and Development of Rational Choice Analysis

Two primary assumptions in rational choice theory

1) Individuals have preferences.2) They try to pursue those preferences.

- Rational individuals will not exert effort from which they gain no utility.

- It is difficult to exclude noncontributors from consumption of collective goods.

Origins and Development of Rational Choice Analysis

• Collective Choice Theory - The body of work that focuses on interdependent choices and especially on solving collective action dilemmas.- Collective choice theorists figure out how collective actions happens.

• Game theory- A particular method of diagramming the interactive choices that rational actors might make when they make individual but interdependent decisions. (Collective action dilemma)

• Methodological individualism- It stipulates simply that the collective action insight demonstrates to us that we do not understand the behavior of a group until we under the choices make by the individuals in it.

Optional Nonnormative Derivations for Those Interested in Politics

• The Principal-Agent Problem- Two individuals have different (real) preferences and one of them is in some formal sense the boss (principal), trying to order the other one (the “agent) to do something.

• Regulatory Capture- The principal has very few resources at her disposal to influence the agent, but the agent who is subject to regulation has vastly more resources than the principal does.

• Rent-Seeking- Changing public policy from widely advertised public goals to private ones.

Ideological Prescriptions that combine Normative Values with Rational Choice Derivations

The Left-libertari-ans

Economic conserva-tives

The Right-libertari-ans

The poor, Underrepre-sented

Pro market and anti-governmentalist

The rich, Elites,Represented

faith in government’s work: especially re-dressing the balance between the rich and the poor.

Impossible to produce collective goods through political process.Faith to protect liberty, property rights, provide court enforcement, but gov only intervene in the market in special occasion.

Faith to produce ordered markets, protection of property rights, and a le-gal system to enforce contracts, but no faith in government to do any-thing else.

Criticisms of Rational Choice Analysis Critiques Defense

People have clear preference ordering before choosing

Irrational behavior exists

Failing to explain where preferences come from

Does not attempt to explain it

Being mechanically inept to explain situation choosing between conflicting preferences

World is messy and troubled place

People spend all their time acquiring data about their options

Calculating and collecting data ahead of time

Being tautological Practitioners do too often use behavior as the indicator of preferences

People are materialistic and greedy of that all of their preferences can be quantified

RC analysis is not the same as the researcher’s values

Strengths of Rational Choice Analysis

1) Treat the initial assumptions of RC as temporary and testable. It gives opportunity to examine the real world once again with greater care than before.

2) Collective action insight. Real people do have these problems convince that the assumptions are right.

Rational Choice and Area Studies

• Productive partnership• Agronomist story• “RCT is simple but useful tool that forces

people to ask one more round of questions that leads to discover variety in cultural values and institutions along with other generalities in the human condition.”

• RCT=common sense

Conclusion

• Rational choice might appear to be a perspective that would be attractive to generalists seeking universal laws of human behavior, but its universal claims are quite innocuous (not risky) in assuming only that people have preferences of some kind and try to pursue them.

Discussion

• How do you evaluate rational choice theory as one of the tools to study area studies?

• Can we conduct Area Studies by Rational decisions? What about Social Science?