[lbo-talk] Larry Summers on the academic hiearchy

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Feb 17 14:09:14 PST 2006


These aren't the same thing. Rational choice models encompass a broad range of choices that presume people are rational, reasonably well-informed political actors who behave in their self-interest. The assumptions are idealized of course, but not identical to those of neoclassical economics, for example. The work is not necessarily individualistic -- until pretty recently the main locus of RTC in political science was in realist theories of international relations, where the self-interested actors are states.

Individualistic approaches, or anyway analyses emphasizing the economic (in this sense) rationality of individuals include the classic work of Mancur Olson, which analyzes the bars that individualism poses for collective action (haven't Marxists always said this?) or Anthony Downs' Economic Theory of Democracy, which treats citizens as "consumers," not a ridiculous approach, descriptively speaking. Taken to a ludicrous extreme you get things like Gary Becker's Neoclassical Theories of Everything, but the man is not necessarily representative of RTC approaches.

RTC in individualistic ways been applied to analyze the behavior of bureaucracies or legislatures using these models -- in extreme versions this can lead to public choice theory of the Tullock-Buchanan sort, on which all governments, indeed, all organizations, seek "rent" (i.e., to maximize resources they control but didn't create), but while there is something to these insights (at least from the perspective of Chicago politics -- I mean the city, not the university), the PCT combine a withering skepticism towards government's ability to accomplish anything that is manifestly unjustified with a touching faith in the efficiency and productivity of markets. Their stuff has to be taken with a ton of salt. A better and saner writer in this general framework is Oliver Williamson, whose is also happy to apply his reasoning to private bureaucracies like those or corporations,a and so is a lot less cheery about markets.

Then there are social choice crowd. SCT derives from the work of Kenneth Arrow, who, based on a simple set of mostly platitudinous assumptions about democracy and some fancy neoclassical mathematics showed that the assumptions are not mutually consistent. (This follows in the tradition of 18th century analysts like Constant.) STC theory is mostly about figuring out either what is wrong with the Arrow Theorem and how we can either get around by showing its premises or assumptions are wrong or how we can accept it but still aggregate preference into a social choice function, making political theory safe for democracy either way. More broadly SCT is about how rational actors generate social choices.

Now, has all this constituted a negative turn in polisci? I think the verdict has to be mixed. There has been a lot of first rate, deep, and interesting work of lasting intellectual value. Virtually every person I have named here is worth reading and has things to offer the left.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that in association with the quants (political scientists who worship statistical analysis), the formal political theorists have started to or maybe already have attained an arrogant hegemony over people who "merely" analyze politics in a narrative, case-study, sociological, or historical way -- much less normative political theory. That's not good. Though it has happened all over for obvious reasons -- it's a lot easier to see whether a theorem has been proved (never mind how important it is) or a familiar cookie cutter RTC analysis applied to an new phenomenon than to think about politics as a human activity.

Anyway, back to work.


> can't really speak to smartness of above, however, i
> do think that
> rise of so-called 'formal' political theory (whether
> called 'rational
> choice'/'public choice'/'social choice') drawing
> upon example of
> economic theory in building up models based on
> procedural rules,
> usually about 'rationally' self-interested behavior
> of individuals
> involved has - with a few exceptions - constituted
> negative turn in
> poli sci... mh
>
>
>
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>
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