When I was in grad school at Michigan I had a class on World Politics with a prof who, introducing various approaches to the subject, said of rational choice theory that it presented the advantage that you didn't need much if any empirical data to theorize about whatever. He was quite serious that this was a plus for RCT. To be fair, he was pretty typical Michigan poli sci number cruncher (that's not _quite_ redundant) who mainly did empirical statistical work. All that being said, Olson, Downs and other RCT political scientists have suggested a lot of fertile hypotheses for empirical research.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 3, 2007, at 10:17 AM, Wojtek Sokolowski
> wrote:
>
> > Doug:
> >
> > I never know what to make of these claims. The
> Dems often really
> > suck, but 1) they've always been good
> imperialists, and 2) though the
> > New Deal and Great Society are long dead, there
> are still big
> > differences between D and R on labor law, minimum
> wage, tax policy,
> > and health care. Look at the current fight over
> expanding the Child
> > Health program - Ds for, Rs against. As I keep
> saying, to no apparent
> > effect, the differences between the two parties
> are wider now than
> > they were in the 1950s and early 1960s. It's a
> mathematical fact.
> >
> >
> > [WS:] Not according to Hotelling's law:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling's_law
> >
> > In essence the law should apply regardless to the
> number of vendors or
> > parties involved - three or four party solution
> would yield a
> > similar trend
> > toward the center.
>
> You answer an empirical observation from the world
> of politics with a
> theory from the world of economics?
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