The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences

Chapter Two: Revisiting the Pathologies of Rational Choice

C H A P T E R T W O Revisiting the Pathologies of Rational Choice Donald Green and Ian Shapiro THE SOCIAL SCIENCES were founded amid high expectations about what could be learned through systematic study of human affairs, and perhaps as a result social scientists are periodically beset by intellectual crises. Each generation of scholars expresses disappointment with the rate at which knowledge accumulates and yearns for a new, more promising form of social science. The complexity of most social phenomena, the crudeness with which explanatory variables can be measured, and the inability to perform controlled experiments may severely constrain what any form of social science can deliver. Nevertheless, nostrums that seem to put social science on the same path as the natural and physical sciences have great appeal. One can scarcely attend an academic conference in the social sciences without hearing someone, young or old, wax eloquent about the need for more linguistic precision, analytic refinement , and rigorous theorizing. Into the breach steps rational choice theory, the essence of which is that people maximize utility in formally specifiable ways. As we point out in Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, variants of rational choice theory impose different assumptions about the sorts of utilities people maximize, the nature of the beliefs they possess, and the manner in which they acquire and process information.1 All share in common, however, a concern with the existence and nature of equilibria resulting from strategic interaction. A given work of rational choice scholarship may be 1 Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 17–30. 52 C H A P T E R T W O more or less formal in presentation, but its claims about social equilibria must in principle be deducible from a logic of instrumental behavior. Only by dint of haute mathematiques snobbery or technical aversion could one fail to be impressed by the analytic achievements of rational choice theory in political science. Each passing year witnesses some new extension or refinement in what has become a vast web of interconnected logical propositions. To all appearances, this immense deductive system would seem to furnish the rigorous, cumulative theory that has long been the El Dorado of social science. But what has this theoretical apparatus contributed to the stock of knowledge about politics? The central claim of our book is that very little has been learned by way of nonobvious propositions that withstand empirical scrutiny. One encounters arresting propositions that are not sustainable (e.g., that changes in collective incentives have little effect on rates of participation in large groups; or that majority rule engenders voting cycles over redistributive questions). And one encounters sustainable propositions that are not arresting (e.g., that rising selective incentives increase participation in collective action; or that supermajoritarian voting rules limit opportunities for policy change). But seldom does one encounter applications of rational choice theory that are at once arresting and sustainable. It is customary for proponents of rational choice theory to meet this charge by shifting the burden of persuasion. They will defy the critic to show that rational behavior plays no role whatsoever in politics or, in the case of particular anomalies, to establish that no conceivable rational choice logic could account for the phenomenon in question. Neither rejoinder suffices to vindicate rational choice theory. Alternatively , defenders of rational choice theory will lay claim to intuitions that are widely shared by nonrational choice theorists, reminding us that behaviors like voting become less frequent as they become more costly. The idea that human action is to some degree price elastic, although important and empirically sustainable, nonetheless runs afoul of what Robyn Dawes calls the Grandmother Test: “Is the sustainable proposition one of which Robyn’s grandmother is unaware?” As we noted in Pathologies, virtually all students of politics, past and present, harbor causal intuitions consistent with rational choice theory.2 The question is whether the advent of rational choice scholarship has added to the existing stock of knowledge. 2 Ibid., p. 147. R E V I S I T I N G R A T I O N A L C H O I C E 53 Of course, as Bernard Grofman points out in an essay entitled “On the Gentle Art of Rational Choice Bashing,” it is one thing to assert...