Rational choice institutionalism

Rational choice institutionalism in political science has its roots in the problems encountered by rational choice analysts, in particular those inter­ested in American congressional behaviour.

In short, rational choice institutionalists brought the state back in as a way of explaining outcomes that could not be explained by universal theo­ries of rational action without reference to institutional context. But rather than asking about the context itself, meaning the state, they generally took the institutions as given and asked about the nature of rational action within such institutions. Thus, they posit rational actors with fixed prefer­ences who calculate strategically to maximize those preferences and who, in the absence of institutions that promote complementary behaviour through co-ordination, confront collective action problems such as the ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ and the ‘tragedy of the commons’, where individual actors’ choice can only lead to sub-optimal solutions (Elster and Hylland 1986; Ostrom 1990).

In American politics, rational choice institutionalist analyses are found in principal-agent theories of how ‘principals’ - e.g., congress, the executive, or political parties - maintain control or gain compliance from the ‘agents’ to which they delegate power - e.g., bureaucracies, regulatory agencies, or courts (e.g., McCubbins and Sullivan 1987).

Rational choice institutionalism works best at identifying the interests and motivations behind rational actors’ behaviour within given institu­tional settings. The deductive nature of its approach to explanation means that it is tremendously helpful at capturing the range of reasons actors would normally have for any action within a given institutional incentive structure as well as at predicting likely outcomes, even if future-oriented predictions are rarely offered. It is also good at bringing out anomalies or actions that are unexpected given the general theory. However, for the most part it cannot explain these anomalies if they depart radically from interest-motivated action, and therefore might better be explained in sociological, historical, or discursive institutional terms (Scharpf l997). Moreover, where the push is toward universalistic generalizations, problems with overgeneralization abound. One approach that consciously seeks to avoid this problem is the ‘actor-centred institutionalism’ of Fritz Scharpf (1991), which develops ‘bounded generalizations’ about the outcomes of actors’ institutionally-constituted strategic interactions through the identifi­cation of subsets of cases in which variance in policy outcomes can be explained by variances in the same set of factor constellations (i.e., problems, policy legacies, actors’ attributes, and institutional interactions).

But however ‘bounded’ the generalizations, because of rational choice institutionalism’s very deductiveness, along with a theoretical generality that starts from universal claims about rationality, rational choice institu­tionalism has difficulty explaining any one individual’s reasons for action within a given context or any particular set of real political events (Green and Shapiro l994).

The rational choice institutionalist approach is also often highly func­tionalist because it tends to explain the origins of an institution largely in terms of its effects; highly intentionalist because it assumes that rational actors not only perceive the effects of the institutions that affect them but can also create and control them; and highly voluntarist because they see institutional creation as a quasi-contractual process rather than affected by asymmetries of power (see Bates 1987; Hall and Taylor 1996: 952).

In addition, rational choice institutionalist explanation is static (see Blyth 1997; Green and Shapiro 1994). Because it assumes fixed preferences and is focused on equilibrium conditions, it has difficulty accounting for why institutions change over time other than in purely functionalist terms. Moreover, rational choice institutionalists’ emphasis on the self-interested nature of human motivation, especially where it is assumed to be economic self-interest, is value-laden, and can appear economically deterministic. The normative assumptions lie in positing political action as motivated by instrumental rationality alone, and thereby risks making the utilitarian calculus within established institutions the universal arbiter of justice (e.g., Elster and Hylland 1986: 22 - see the critique by Immergut 1998: 14). What is more, despite the fact that rational choice institutionalists could question the institutional rules within which rational actors seek to maximize their utility, either in terms of the justness of the institutional rules or of the exercise of institutional power, they generally do not (see Immergut 1998: 13). They don’t even question them in terms of efficiency (e.g., North 1990)! Instead, as Terry Moe complains, they tend to see insti­tutions ‘as good things, and it is their goodness that ultimately explains them: they exist and take the forms they do because they make people better off’ (2003: 3, cited in Thelen 2004). A notable exception is Margaret Levi’s Marxian rationalist analysis of the ‘predatory’ state with regard to tax collection (1989). But mostly, institutions - and with them the state - are assumed to be good things that create greater stability for rational actors’ utility-maximization.