Thanks to King Politics for introducing me to a great article by Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic on the dominance of rational choice theory in political science. The use of econometric modeling over historical or interpretive methods has come to dominate the discipline in the last two decades. So much so that renegade Political Scientists created a Perestroika movement aimed at introducing more methodological pluralism into the discipline.
At its core, this debate is more than an abstract methodological argument. It’s really about whether we can we study the social world the same way we study the natural world. Or as Cohn puts it:
Whether this is good for the discipline depends in part on whether rational choice scholarship really succeeds on its own terms–whether it really helps us understand the elements of political behavior it purports to explain. But beneath that question lurks a second issue more important to those of us outside the academy: whether political scientists have an obligation to do work that is not merely interesting as an intellectual enterprise but also helps us govern ourselves.
To what extend should we be concerned with applying empirical approaches to addressing normative questions? If rational choice/econometric modeling can help us address poverty or human rights abuses, then I’m all for it. The key flaw, it seems to me, with a rational approach is that it pursues universality. it wants to model and test behavioral and institutional outcomes on a large scale. To make the leap from research to practical application requires a “thick” understanding of particular contexts.
My sympathies in this regard lie with post-positivst approaches like Charles Ragin’s fuzzy-set work. I’m also a fan of Bent Flyvberg’s Making Social Science Matter. Both in their own way advocate for a greater emphasis on context in empirical work. I personally would love a greater emphasis in social science on trying to discover when and where things fail and w succeed rather than trying to make universal declarations about what works and what fails.
Comments 2
Scott Bergemann — March 20, 2009
While reading the blog, I couldn't help but be reminded of Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes attempted to use rational thought to create a more scientific approach to political theory. The problem that I found with this approach is that you cannot make "universal declarations" for an entire population of people because human beings simply too unpredictable. It seems logical that these modern political scientists are striving for universal explanations of political behavior, but the fact remains that you cannot reduce politics to a mere science, there's too many variables. It sounds promising, but I agree with you in taking a "see what works and what fails" approach and addressing the problems individually.
Kenneth M. Kambara — March 20, 2009
In my opinion, the problem with these approaches is that the research isn't that useful because of the assumptions or ignoring of the assumptions of rational choice. In org studies, there's a divide with the population ecologists who want to use biological metaphors and models for predicting survival. Well, survival of organizations isn't quite like survival of organisms and the metaphor is a stretch, at least to me and a bunch of others. I will say this. Rational choice or pop. ecology could provide insights with a multi-method approach.
As Scott notes above, there are too many variables and even if you have them, good old reliability and validity break down.