the 20th century. The essence of the approach is very simple. It maintains that
the primary explanation for an action is that the actor calculated said action to
be the most efficient way of acquiring a desired goal. Obvious as this must seem
to anyone from outside the social sciences or philosophy, it is in fact neither
obvious, simple, or even necessarily often true. Rational choice theory is the
best, indeed usually the only, approach available to economists, but it is
controversial as to whether or not our economic behaviour is typical of our
more general social behaviour. When buying or selling it is a rare person who
deliberately acts other than to maximize a relatively measurable utility.
(Though even in economics phenomena like brand loyalty or ‘retail-therapy’
can decidedly blur the edges of rational strategic calculation.)
Votingbehaviour was the first area to which political scientists applied
rational choice theory, because it is relatively easy to see the act of voting as
akin to making a purchase. The voter trades in his vote by giving it to the party
whose political programme he thinks will most likely benefit him. Even here
there are alternative theories, the most common being that voters have a
psychological tie to a party like that of a sports fan to a football team, and
voting is no more rational than automatically supporting Manchester City FC
because one was born in Manchester. Equally a protest vote, given to a party of
which one does not particularly approve in order to signal disaffection with the
one that might be the ‘rational’ choice, is problematic. The problem then is
that almost any action can be shown to be rational, if one sufficiently widens
the meaning of the rational connection. Thus, a protest vote is rational if one
aims to send a signal; voting for a party because one identifies with it
psychologically, is rational if propping up one’s self-image is a target that can
be realized through rational achievement. The economists’ use of rationality
works because they can readily dispense with ideas like altruism or mood, and
because they are more concerned about predicting aggregate behaviour rather
than individual behaviour. Thus, even if quite a lot of people buy soap powder
because the colour of the package attracts them, these individual non-rational
behaviours are likely to cancel out in the aggregate, leaving a result that looks
price-and-cost rational.
Much of social behaviour has not traditionally been seen as means–end
related, but rather as the result of acting out values, social expectations, or sheer
habit (traditional ways are preferred simply because they are traditional).
Nevertheless, rational choice theory has been applied, sometimes with sur-
prisingly successful results, even to such areas as church attendance, participa-
tion in hopeless political protest, and the lower rate of female participation in
politics. The main criticism of it is more to do with how full an explanation
rational choice theory can provide. It may be that given an actor’s set of values,
much of what he chooses can be shown to follow a rational choice paradigm.
Typically though, we want to know why he or she held the values in the first
Rational Choice Theory