Political Choice

Institutions, Rules And The Limits Of Rationality

Roland M Czada, Adrienne Windhoff-Heritier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367283391
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000307160
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, subtitled "political actors in institutional settings", addresses the main lines of reasoning of the new political institutionalism and rational choice theory. It discusses the question: Which particular rules, logics, or strategies of action can be found in the realm of politics?

Part one
Rational Actors in Institutional Settings

II
Institutions, Interests and Political Choice

Adrienne Windhoff-Héritier

In the past years homo oeconomicus has invaded political sciences, rational choice explanations penetrating into all fields of research: Voters presumably vote with respect to their interests and legislators organize coalitions according to their intentions. Bureaucratic and associative behavior, even the development of constitutions - all enjoy the analytical attention of rational choice theorists. In their view political decisions result from a rational process which assesses the benefits and costs of a specific course of action in the light of defined targets.

Inspite of, or because of its fascinating simplicity, the model of rational man has provoked as much enthusiastic acceptance as vehement criticism from political scientists. It gave rise to a renewed controversy over alternative explanatory approaches in political sciences which may be reduced to the following question: Are political decisions and actions more adequately understood in terms of intentional action guided by individual preferences or as the outflow of institutional structures and procedures? New political institutionalism is the keyword in this controversy.

The new political institutionalism claims, that reducing political phenomena to economic explanations is tantamount to admitting that political institutions in themselves do not influence political behavior. Consequently, it is assumed that political sciences do not have original explanatory power, that they lead a "second-hand life".

James G. March and Johan P. Olsen were the first to critically point out the economy- and society-centeredness of political sciences. Later Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol called for a revival of an institution- centered analysis of pol itical behavior.

Political institutions in the view of these political scientists are not merely the arenas in which political processes occur, and which are moved by external economic and social factors. Rather, political institutions such as the distribution of political positions, procedural rules, and standard operating procedures, have a weight of their own. They determine political decision processes and their outcomes to a considerable extent. "Political institutions are building blocks of politics. They influcence available options for policy-making and for institutional change. They also influence the choices made among available options. Thus, an institutional perspective requires a careful delineation of the nature of particular institutional arrangements" (Krasner 1987).

Both analytical approaches, the rational choice approach as well as the institutionalist approach, are no doubt of theoretical and empirical relevance in explaining political decisions. Assuming this is the case, it still mains unclear, however, whether or not they are mutually exclusive. If not, how do they relate to each other, if both are applied to the explanation of political decision-making in a specific policy field? It is the aim of this contribution to examine possibilities of linking the two analytical perspectives. More modestly, their mutual relationship will be assessed under some selected aspects, since political sciences can only lose if one approach is used exclusively.

To develop the argument, I will proceed in three steps: Firstly, central assumptions of rational choice theory, and the critique waged against it, as well as the ensuing modifications in theory will be summarized roughly. Secondly, the contrasting institutionalist view will be presented and criticized, thirdly, the possibilities of linking the two analytical perspectives will be discussed on a theoretical level and illustrated by means of examples of empirical research.

Rational Choice and Political Decision-making

According to rational choice theory, all decisions can be explained by recurring to the rational self-interest of the individual agent. The latter pursues specific intentions, assesses alternative actions in terms of their benefits and costs, and thereby develops his preferences. It is assumed that he is well aware of his preferences, that he is able to compare them and bring them into a systematic order. All possible options of action, as well as their consequences, are known to him. Thus, agents are supposed to assess alternative courses of action in the light of the highest possible benefit or least possible cost (Stigler 1981:188), "...be it a real one (like profit) or a purely notional one (like the utility function representing preferences)" (Elster 1979:113). However, the agent acts within specific "constraints" which are assumed as given.

It is widely accepted that this decision model, intriguing as it may be in its simple elegance, far from adequately explains even trivial political everyday decisions. The criticism applied to it not only points out that political institutions and society in general are reduced to the "constraints" within which the agent is deciding; it also phasizes that this simple model abstracts from the complexities of political reality, enhancing at best in the Weberian idealtypical sense that rational action and the disorderly reality of political life diverge to a large extent.

More precisely, critics stress that an individual is always acting in relation to other agents. The actor does not know with certainty what his preferences are, much less what those of the other agents are. Moreover, the assumption that the rational agent disposes of complete information about all possible courses of action seems questionable. This is especially the case, once you try to imagine how many costs it would create to provide complete information about all possible courses of action and their consequences. Therefore, through a decisionist short-cut, decision-makers recur to a mode of "satisfying" decision-making to economize information costs (Simon 1954:990 since every decisional situation is characterized by uncertainty, information overload and ambiguity.

But ambiguity lies within the individual, too. Its preferences are manifold ("the multiple self" - Elster 1985) and are changing constantly. The agent may disapprove of his decision once he experiences its results ("complexities of the second guess"). His multiple preferences are not consistent, may be conflicting, and are non-transitive. They are lexikographic, which means that some preferences cannot be substituted by others, but by their very nature range above others. In short, preferences are not equivalent: Not everything has its price (Tietzel 1988:15). Rather, man has the capacity to reflect upon his preferences and to rank them (George 1987:94). Preferences which are of immediate relevance for action are derived from "higher" meta-preferences. Thus, the individual may be seen as managing his various preferences within his "egonomics" (Schelling 1984:5). The potential infinite regress in the derivation of preferences is short-cut by a decision to identify with a specific preference, or by explaining preferences by causal factors such as social norms or institutional structures (Elster 1979:115). In short, preferences cannot be assumed as given, instead are being shaped by the individual himself, by society, by cultural traditions, and by political institutions.

In many respects, rational choice theory has taken account in its further developments of the criticisms addressed to its explanatory approach. Thus, the "new institutionalist economics" explicitly claim that preferences are not to be viewed as static and external to economic analysis, but as a dynamic and integral part of economic theory (Sheffrin 1978:785). The individual agent is no longer seen in a parametric, constant environment, but in a changing environment. Thus, the concept of strategic rationality, developed in game theory, includes other agents as well who - to a large extent - constitute the environment of the agent, while the latter in his turn makes up the environment of the other actors.

Strategic rationality has still another implication for rational choice theory. It not only means that other actors are taken into account when the agent acts rationally. It also indicates that the agent may forego short-term benefits in order to realize long-term benefits, that collective actors may subordinate special interests to common interests, in short, that the agent is capable "de reculer pour mieux sauter" (Leibniz, cf. Elster 1979:10). In doing so the agent intentionally creates constraints which restrict the realm of his possible actions. If we relate the strategic concept of action to the abovementioned concept of meta-preferences or multiple individual preferences, it may be expressed in the following terms: The immediately action-relevant preferences of the "doer", which are of a short-term character, are dismissed in favor of the long-term interests of the "planner" (Thaler/Shefin 1981:394).

Finally, public choice theorists, especially Mancur Olson, demonstrated that individual rationality may not be congruent with collective rationality. For, as the famous free-rider problem shows, from the viewpoint of the individual it is not rational to participate in the production of a collective good if he cannot be excluded from the consumption of this collective good.

The short outline of the basic assumptions of rational choice theory may have shown that in many respects this theoretical approach is inadequate to explain complex political behavior. Also depicted, however, is the modification of the theory as presented by the discussion about endogenous preferences. It integrates the development of preferences into economic explanations, as well as including other actors in game theory as part of the environment. Finally, the emphasis on metapreferences and strategic rationality offers important analytical viewpoints. These in turn lend themselves to the integration of rational choice theory and institutionalist analysis.

Before assessing some of the possibilities of tying rational choice and institutionalist analysis together, the main aspects of the institutionalist approach and its problems will be outlined.

New Institutionalism and Political Decision-making

Given a second, more scrutinizing look, "new" political institutionalism is revealed to be an "old" institutionalism. Plato describes the pursuit of justice as one of the main tasks of the state. Aristotle claims that the constitution enables a good and virtuous life, and they both focus on the institutional conditions which "render the citizen good through habitualisation " (Aristotle). Only with the rise of the modern, mechanistic conception of the world did human behavior and collective action come to be considered rational. Perceived benefits and costs were weighed on the one hand, and means and purposes on the other (Hobbes, Bentham).

Durkheim and Weber were the first to emphasize the influence of social order and traditions on human behavior. Next to rational and value-orientied behavior they constitute the third source of human behavior. Traditional behavior is "...very often a matter of almost automatic reaction to habitual stimuli which guide behavior in a course which has been repeatedly followed. The great bulk of everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed approaches this type."(Weber 1968:25). According to Weber, traditions represent individual conceptions of social order which do not fully determine social behavior, but offer opportunities of action which are observed by most actors in a society. An institutionalist argument is presented by Weber as well in his analysis of bureaucracy, when he emphasizes the perils of bureaucracy as the "Gehäuse der Hörigkeit", inevitably resulting from the bureaucratic domain and endangering the individual autonomy of man. This peril - in his view - can be domesticated only by parliamentarian control.

In recent times institutionalist analysis has been revived by comparative policy and politics research. Without explicitly trying to make an institutionalist argument, institutions are regarded as one independent variable among others to explain policy decisions. This research often furthered empirical evidence showing that political institutions, to a significant extent, explain policy outcomes (von Beyme 1987:58). This finding culminated in the - for political scientists reassuring - insight that "politics matter" (Newton/Sharpe 1984; Schmidt 1986).

However, it was James G. March arid Johan P. Olseri who most emphatically advanced the new institutionalist approach as a systematic program of research: According to March and Olsen, political and policy decisions may in part be derived from political institutions as "irretrievable sources" of political action. The authors define institutions in a somewhat loose sense as a number of interconnected rules and routines which define the adequate action as a relationship between a role and a situation (March/Olsen 1989).

In their view, structures and rules influence decisions in their own right. For politics is only in part rational and consequence-oriented. It also is oriented to a considerable extent in the process itself: Decisional processes are just as concerned with the attribution of status, with the definition of truth and virtue, and the maintenance of loyalty and legitimacy (March/Olsen 1975:12). Thus, standard operating procedures "...affect the substantive outcomes of choices by regulating the access of participants, problems, and solutions to choices, and by affecting the participants' allocation of attention, their standards of evaluation, priorities, perceptions, identities, and resources" (Olsen, this volume, p. 93).

Along this line of argument, March and Olsen contrast the rule of "appropriateness" to the rule of "consequentially" as principles of action. According to the rule of "appropriateness", actions are matched by choosing adequate rules and routines in specific situations. They conclude that the individual personality...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• I Introduction
• Part One Rational Actors in Institutional Settings
• Part Two The Politics of Collective Action
• Name Index
• Subject Index