Volume 97 - August 2003
Editorial
Notes from the Editor
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- 22 August 2003, pp. iii-vii
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It is well known that the bulk of the economic cost of a war is incurred many years after the armed hostilities themselves have ceased. By any reasonable and humane accounting, the human cost of a war is likely to far outweigh the economic cost. The immediate human toll, tallied in body counts, is apt to be terrible. But how much of the human cost, like the economic cost, does not become clear until long afterwards? That question, applied to one particular form of armed conflict, civil war, motivates the chillingly-titled “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long After the Shooting Stops” by Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett. Analyzing death and disability data for 1999, Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett paint a grim picture of the impact of the civil wars that were fought earlier in the decade and show how this impact was manifested in particular diseases and conditions and how it affected particular groups of non-combatants. This is not a pleasant article to read, but it is undeniably an important one.
NOTES
Notes from the Editor
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- 27 August 2003, pp. iii-vii
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Scarcely a day has passed in the last decade without reports appearing of yet another act of suicide terrorism (the subject matter of this issue's cover graphic) in the world's established and emerging hotspots. In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape posits that “Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not.” Rather, such attacks are intended to achieve specific political purposes. To examine these acts, Pape has assembled a database of suicide attacks worldwide, 1980–2001. His findings–among other things, that suicide terrorism often “pays” from the perspective of group leaders because it leads governments to make concessions–will enable scholars to achieve a new understanding of this complex phenomenon. Nor does Pape shy away from considering the policy implications of his findings. Consequently, this important article is destined to inform not only scholarship but also policy-making for years to come.
Editorial
Notes from the Editor
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- 29 December 2003, pp. iii-viii
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The American Political Science Review depends on the kindness of strangers—most conspicuously, on the good will of those to whom we turn for evaluations of the papers that are submitted to us. Although we have little to offer in return, we do what we can to repay this kindness by sending each reviewer an individual thank-you letter along with copies of my decision letter and the other reviews of the paper. Once a year, too, we provide a little extra recognition by printing the names of the hundreds of reviewers, from every part of our discipline and from many neighboring disciplines and interdisciplinary fields as well, who have voluntarily contributed their time and expertise. This year's list, which appears elsewhere in this issue, recognizes those who reviewed for the APSR between mid-August, 2002 and mid-August, 2003. Sine qua non.
Notes from the Editor
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- 12 March 2003, pp. iii-viii
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Welcome to the first-ever February issue of the APSR, which, by no coincidence, is also our first book reviewless issue. As indicated in prior “Notes from the Editor,” beginning with the first issue of Volume 97, the APSR's cover dates now become February, May, August, and November, rather than the familiar March, June, September, and December. This change has been made to accommodate the APSA's new Perspectives on Politics, which will be published on a quarterly basis, with its inaugural issue appearing a month from now, in March 2003. Formerly bundled with the APSR, PS will now appear in your mailbox in January, April, July, and October; by now you should already have received the January 2003 issue. These changes have been necessitated by the complexities of publishing and distributing three quarterly journals rather than two.
Research Article
Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township
- ROBERT T. GANNETT
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- 12 March 2003, pp. 1-16
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Despite elevating Alexis de Tocqueville to iconic status in our national debate on civic engagement, we have frequently neglected the range and depth of his associational thought. In this essay, I trace the early manifestations and evolution from 1828 to 1840 of his understanding of the commune or township, a featured source of public participation and cohesion within his larger associational lexicon. I show how his reflections on local liberties, in general, and the New England township, in particular, inspired and helped to shape both volumes of his Democracy in America. I emphasize the degree to which Tocqueville saw the participatory vector originating in the township's political life as galvanizing an ardent civic spirit leading to cultural, intellectual, and economic achievements. I conclude by seeking to connect lessons gleaned from Tocqueville's township to contemporary strategies to strengthen citizen participation.
For their early encouragement and advice, I thank Clark Gilpin and David Tracy, leaders of the Brauer Seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I presented an initial version of this essay in spring 1994. I am grateful to the late François Furet, who also commented upon that early paper, and Ralph Lerner, who read and notated each of its successive formulations, for their generous and sage oversight of my ensuing Tocquevillian studies. I also thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their comments and constructive criticisms.
ARTICLES
The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City
- CLARISSA RILE HAYWARD
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- 29 December 2003, pp. 501-514
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Most contemporary theorizing that addresses questions of democracy and difference is framed by broadly constructivist claims. Yet when it comes to thinking about democratic state intervention into social relations of difference, political theorists tend to stress reactive strategies, overlooking the role that democratic states play in helping shape and reinforce social definitions of difference. Exploring the case of the construction of racialized difference in the American city, the author makes the case that arguments for tolerating, for recognizing, and for deliberating across extant differences are insufficiently attentive to the role states play in making difference. Institutional efforts to deal with difference democratically should target the points at which it gets produced, aiming not simply to modify the effects of social definitions of identity and difference—but to democratize the processes through which these are defined and redefined.
Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long After the Shooting Stops
- HAZEM ADAM GHOBARAH, PAUL HUTH, BRUCE RUSSETT
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- 22 August 2003, pp. 189-202
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Political scientists have conducted only limited systematic research on the consequences of war for civilian populations. Here we argue that the civilian suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the period of active warfare. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test hypotheses about the impact of civil wars and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991–97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions and disproportionately affects women and children.
We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Military Conflict as a Public Health Problem, the Ford Foundation, and the World Health Organization, NIA (P01 17625-01), for financial support and Gary King, Thomas Gariepy, Melvin Hinich, Kosuke Imai, Roy Licklider, Jennifer Leaning, Greg Huber, Lisa Martin, Christopher Murray, Joshua Salomon, and Nicholas Sambanis for comments. Our data are available at http://www.yale.edu/unsy/civilwars/data.htm and at the Virtual Data Center web site, http://TheData.org, when it becomes operative.
The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
- ROBERT A. PAPE
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- 27 August 2003, pp. 343-361
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Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.
I thank Robert Art, Mia Bloom, Steven Cícala, Alex Downs, Daniel Drezner, Adria Lawrence, Sean Lynn-Jones, John Mearsheimer, Michael O'Connor, Sebastian Rosato, Lisa Weeden, the anonymous reviewers, and the members of the program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago for their superb comments. I especially thank James K. Feldman and Chaim D. Kaufmann for their excellent comments on multiple drafts. I would also like to acknowledge encouragement from the committee for the Combating Political Violence paper competition sponsored by the Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, which selected an earlier version as a winning paper.
Research Article
James Madison's Principle of Religious Liberty
- VINCENT PHILLIP MUÑOZ
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- 12 March 2003, pp. 17-32
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Although James Madison has been invoked by justices and judicial scholars for over 100 years, Madison's principle of religious liberty has never been fully grasped or adopted by the Supreme Court. Judges and scholars have failed to understand Madison's radical but simple teaching that religion is not part of the social compact and, therefore, that the state may not take religion within its cognizance. In this article I set forth Madison's principle of “noncognizance” in light of the social compact theory he articulates in the “Memorial and Remonstrance.” I then attempt to show how it consistently explains Madison's political actions and writings on religious liberty. I conclude by explaining how a “Madisonian” approach, properly understood, would adjudicate the First Amendment's religion clauses.
The author would like to thank Mark Blitz, Charles R. Kesler, Nicholas May, Ralph A. Rossum, and Michael Uhlmann for their comments on drafts of this article.
ARTICLES
Rethinking Representation
- JANE MANSBRIDGE
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- 29 December 2003, pp. 515-528
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Along with the traditional “promissory” form of representation, empirical political scientists have recently analyzed several new forms, called here “anticipatory,” “gyroscopic,” and “surrogate” representation. None of these more recently recognized forms meets the criteria for democratic accountability developed for promissory representation, yet each generates a set of normative criteria by which it can be judged. These criteria are systemic, in contrast to the dyadic criteria appropriate for promissory representation. They are deliberative rather than aggregative. They are plural rather than singular.
Constructing Post-Cold War Collective Security
- BRIAN FREDERKING
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- 27 August 2003, pp. 363-378
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September 11 did not fundamentally change world politics. Instead, it exacerbated already existing tensions about how to implement post-cold war collective security rules. Using a rule-oriented constructivist theory of global security, I argue that the dominant post-cold war global security trend is the gradual construction of collective security rules, including rules punishing human rights abuses, terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Using an interpretive method called dialogical analysis, I analyze the debate about intervention in Kosovo and argue that the recent conflict over intervention in Iraq revolves around similar claims about how to implement collective security rules. This analysis challenges arguments that September 11 ushered in a new era of world politics that necessarily justifies more aggressive, preemptive U.S. policies.
I would like to thank Karin Fierke, Yale Ferguson, Gavan Duffy, and David Ahola for comments on earlier drafts, as well as Maximo Sanchez Pagano for research assistance. Any errors are my own.
Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament
- KEVIN NARIZNY
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- 22 August 2003, pp. 203-220
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A major rearmament program can have a lasting effect on the balance of political and economic power between societal groups. It will typically require the expansion of progressive taxation and government interference in the economy, both of which are disproportionately harmful to the interests of the upper classes. Consequently, conservative governments that face a sharp increase in international threat should be more likely than their leftist counterparts to try to substitute alliances and appeasement for arms. I test this hypothesis on Great Britain in 1895–1905, 1907–14, and 1931–39, France in 1904–14 and 1935–39, and the United States in 1938–41, 1948–60, and 1979–86. In all but one of these cases, I find that leftist governments did more to strengthen their countries' militaries than conservatives.
This paper was made possible by the generous support of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. I would also like to thank Ben Fordham, P. R. Goldstone, Greg Mitrovich, Talbot Imlay, Brad Lee, Ken Schultz, Deborah Boucoyannis, Mark Haas, Sean Lynn-Jones, and the participants in the Olin Institute's National Security Seminar Series and the Belfer Center's International Security Program Seminar Series for their helpful comments and advice.
Congressional Enactments of Race–Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced–Gendered Institutions
- MARY HAWKESWORTH
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- 29 December 2003, pp. 529-550
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Investigating reports of marginalization from Congresswomen of color, I examine legislative practices in the 103rd and 104th Congresses to illuminate dynamics that structure hierarchies on the basis of race and gender. I advance an account of racing–gendering as a political process that silences, stereotypes, enforces invisibility, excludes, and challenges the epistemic authority of Congresswomen of color. Racing–gendering constitutes a form of interested bias operating in Congress, which has important implications for understandings of the internal operations of political institutions, the policy priorities of Congresswomen of color, the substantive representation of historically underrepresented groups, and the practice of democracy in the United States.
Research Article
Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations
- LAWRIE BALFOUR
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- 12 March 2003, pp. 33-44
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W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the “post-civil rights” era. His study of the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were guaranteed by law. Arguing that the story of racial injustice is still importantly a story about memory's suppression, I use Du Bois's writings to explore the case for reparations as one element of a larger effort to expose the presence of the slave past and to undermine the continuing effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Memory—of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, of a responsibility abdicated—affects the future conduct of power in any form. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries—the culture of impunity.
Wole Soyinka (1999)
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC, the 2001 meeting of the Collegium for African American Research in Sardinia, Italy, and the 2002 Riker Seminar and Frederick Douglass Institute Seminar at the University of Rochester. I am grateful for the comments of all of the participants at those sessions, as well as for careful readings by Joshua Dienstag, Roxanne Euben, Frederick Harris, George Klosko, James Johnson, Joel Olson, George Shulman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Jeffrey Tucker, and Stephen White.
ARTICLES
Bargaining in Legislatures: An Experimental Investigation of Open versus Closed Amendment Rules
- GUILLAUME R. FRÉCHETTE, JOHN H. KAGEL, STEVEN F. LEHRER
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- 22 August 2003, pp. 221-232
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We investigate the differential effects of open versus closed amendment rules within the framework of a distributive model of legislative bargaining. The data show that there are longer delays in distributing benefits and a more egalitarian distribution of benefits under the open amendment rule, the proposer gets a larger share of the benefits than coalition members under both rules, and play converges toward minimal winning coalitions under the closed amendment rule. However, there are important quantitative differences between the theoretical model underlying the experiment (Baron and Ferejohn 1989) and data, as the frequency of minimal winning coalitions is much greater under the closed rule (the theory predicts minimal winning coalitions under both rules for our parameter values) and the distribution of benefits between coalition members is much more egalitarian than predicted. The latter are consistent with findings from shrinking pie bilateral bargaining game experiments in economics, to which we relate our results.
Research support from the Economics Division and the DRMS Divisions of NSF and the University of Pittsburgh is gratefully acknowledged. We have benefited from comments by David Cooper, Massimo Morelli, Jack Ochs, and seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University, École des Hautes Études Commerciales, Harvard University, Indiana University, ITAM, Université de Montreal, Universite du Québec a Montréal, University of Pittsburgh, Joseph L. Rotman School, University of Toronto, Ohio State University, Texas \widehat{{\rm A}{\&}{\rm M}} University, Tilburg University CENTER, Western Michigan University, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, the 2000 Public Choice Meetings, the 2000 Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics, the 2000 Econometric Society World Congress meetings, and the CEA 35th Annual Meetings. We are responsible for all remaining errors.
Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages, and Party Systems in Africa's Emerging Democracies
- SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR, JAMES R. SCARRITT, GLEN GALAICH
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- 27 August 2003, pp. 379-390
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Do electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages shape the structure of party systems separately or jointly? We examine the independent, additive, and interactive effects on the number of electoral and legislative parties of two institutional variables (district magnitude and proximity of presidential and legislative elections), one intervening variable (effective number of presidential candidates), and two new measures of ethnopolitical cleavages based on constructivist specification of ethnopolitical groups (fragmentation and concentration). Ethnopolitical fragmentation independently reduces the number of parties but, interactively with ethnopolitical concentration, increases it. However, the additive and interactive combinations of both measures with electoral institutions explain the largest amount of variance in the number of parties. These results emphasize the importance of ethnopolitical cleavages in mediating the effects of electoral institutions on the structure of party systems, with important implications for the stability of Africa's emerging democracies in which parties are weak and multiethnic coalitions are fluid.
The National Science Foundation provided financial support (Grant SBER-9515439; Shaheen Mozaffar, Principal Investigator) for the larger project from which this article is drawn. Scarritt supervised the data collection on ethnopolitical groups and Mozaffar supervised the data collection on elections, electoral systems, and party systems. Adrian Prentice Hull of Jackson State University and Michelle Camou and Eitan Schiffman of the University of Colorado at Boulder provided invaluable assistance in the coding of ethnopolitical groups. For many helpful comments on early drafts, the authors thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers, as well as Fabian Camacho, Gary Cox, Ted Gurr, Richard Katz, David Leblang, Arend Lijphart, Tom Mayer, Susan McMillan, Kathleen O'Doherty, Dan Posner, Donald Rothchild, and members of the Globalization and Democratization colloquium at the Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder. Mozaffar thanks the Boston University African Studies Center for continued research support. The data set for the article is available at http://webhost.bridgew.edu/smozaffar/. Final responsibility for the article rests with the authors.
Research Article
Black Opinion on the Legitimacy of Racial Redistricting and Minority-Majority Districts
- KATHERINE TATE
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- 12 March 2003, pp. 45-56
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Minority–majority districts are highly controversial. To assess the degree to which black positions on this controversial matter were well-thought-out and fixed, questions based on Sniderman and Piazza's (1993) “counterargument” technique were included in the 1996 National Black Election Study. Black opinion instability on the issue of race and redistricting reveals the complexity of mass attitudes and the reasoning process and reflects the manner in which a set of clashing interests and core values is balanced and prioritized. Although a large majority of blacks voiced initial opposition to creating districts where blacks and Hispanics are the voting majority, most blacks changed their position in response to the counterargument. This asymmetry suggests that blacks more strongly favor the goal of increasing minority representation than the principle of color blindness in Congressional redistricting. Education and racial identification are key predictors of black opinion on racial redistricting. Less educated blacks and weak racial identifiers were less supportive of minority-majority districts and racial redistricting practices. These results support the revisionist perspective among public opinion scholars that rational, thinking individuals can hold wavering opinions upon questioning because they generally encapsulate a set of contradictory values and interests.
The research reported in this paper was funded by grants to the author from the National Science Foundation POWRE Program (SBR-9743928) and from the National Science Foundation's Political Science Division (SBR-9796212). An earlier version was presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, August 31–September 3, 2000. The author thanks Luis Fraga at Stanford University for his comments as the panel's discussant, as well as the APSR Editor, Lee Sigelman, and reviewers for their contributions to this paper. I also thank Bruce Boyd at Computing Services at UCI and Gary King at Harvard University for their technical assistance.
ARTICLES
Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-level Governance
- HOOGHE LIESBET, MARKS GARY
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- 22 August 2003, pp. 233-243
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The reallocation of authority upward, downward, and sideways from central states has drawn attention from a growing number of scholars in political science. Yet beyond agreement that governance has become (and should be) multi-level, there is no consensus about how it should be organized. This article draws on several literatures to distinguish two types of multi-level governance. One type conceives of dispersion of authority to general-purpose, nonintersecting, and durable jurisdictions. A second type of governance conceives of task-specific, intersecting, and flexible jurisdictions. We conclude by specifying the virtues of each type of governance.
For comments and advice we are grateful to Christopher Ansell, Ian Bache, Richard Balme, Arthur Benz, Tanja Börzel, Renaud Dehousse, Burkard Eberlein, Peter Hall, Edgar Grande, Richard Haesly, Bob Jessop, Beate Kohler-Koch, David Lake, Patrick Le Galés, Christiane Lemke, David Lowery, Michael McGinnis, Andrew Moravcsik, Elinor Ostrom, Franz U. Pappi, Thomas Risse, James Rosenau, Alberta Sbragia, Philippe Schmitter, Ulf Sverdrup, Christian Tusschoff, Bernhard Wessels, the political science discussion group at the University of North Carolina, and the editor and three anonymous reviewers of APSR. We received institutional support from the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin. Earlier versions were presented at the European Union Studies Association meeting, the ECPR pan-European Conference in Bordeaux, and Hannover Universität, Harvard University, Humboldt Universität, Indiana University at Bloomington, Mannheim Universität, Sheffield University, Sciences Po (Paris), Technische Universität München, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order.
Democracy, Inequality, and Inflation
- RAJ M. DESAI, ANDERS OLOFSGÅRD, TARIK M. YOUSEF
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- 27 August 2003, pp. 391-406
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Do democracies suffer higher inflation than nondemocracies? We identify two competing hypotheses regarding the impact of democracy on inflation. In the “populist” approach, inflation is the result of public demands for transfers financed by the inflation tax, suggesting that electoral competition will increase inflation. In the “state-capture” approach, inflation is a result of pressure from elites who derive private benefits from money creation, suggesting that electoral competition may constrain inflation. We present a simple model that captures both ideas and argue that the impact of democracy is conditioned by the prevailing level of income inequality. This claim is tested with data from more than 100 countries between 1960 and 1999 using different dynamic panel estimation methods to control for unobserved effects and the potential endogeneity of some independent variables. We find robust evidence that democracy is associated with lower inflation in lower-inequality countries but with higher inflation in higher-inequality countries.
The authors thank Michael Bailey, Robert Cumby, Philip Keefer, Torsten Persson, Dennis Quinn, George Shambaugh, David Stasavage, and David Strömberg for comments on early drafts. The central bank turnover data used in this paper were generously provided by Jakob de Haan. Previous versions of this paper were delivered at the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association. Financial support from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and research assistance from Jorge Ugaz and Mouneer Odeh are gratefully acknowledged.
Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory
- PAUL K. MacDONALD
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- 29 December 2003, pp. 551-565
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Rational choice theorists have not clearly articulated their epistemological positions, and for this reason, their arguments in favor of rational choice theory are inconsistent, contradictory, and unpersuasive. To remedy this problem, I describe how two of the main positions in the philosophy of science, instrumentalist-empiricism and scientific-realism, act as competing epistemological foundations for rational choice theory. I illustrate how these philosophical perspectives help political scientists (1) understand what is at stake in the theoretical debates surrounding the rationality assumption, self-interest, and methodological individualism, (2) identify inconsistencies in the epistemological positions adopted by rational choice theorists, and (3) assess the feasibility and desirability of a universal theory based on the rationality assumption.