• DOI:10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199548460.003.0002
• Corpus ID: 150590053

Rational Choice Institutionalism

@inproceedings{Shepsle2008RationalCI,
  title={Rational Choice Institutionalism},
  author={Kenneth A. Shepsle},
  year={2008}
}

• K. Shepsle
• Published 12 June 2008
• Economics

Word Count: 6174 " An irrational passion for dispassionate rationality will take all the joy out of life, " wrote the economist John Maurice Clark a century ago. Canonical rational choice theory has been a staple in political science for four decades. While it may have taken the joy out of life for many traditionalists in the field and a behavioralist or two, it has become an engine of social scientific research, producing theoretical micro-foundations, an equilibrium orientation, deductively derived theorems and propositions about political activity, a comparative statics methodology yielding testable hypotheses, and an accumulation of tools and approaches that are routinely found in the curriculum of major graduate programs. We think more sophisticatedly today about optimizing political actors, the organizations of which they are a part, and most recently the role of information in retrospective assessment, systematic foresight, and strategic calculation more generally – that is, we think more sophisticatedly about political purposes, beliefs, opinions, and behavior. We also have more nuanced views about the contexts in which political activity unfolds, the way these contexts channel behavior, and the way behavior, in turn, maintains or alters contexts. These contexts are inhabited by political actors and organizations to be sure, but it is the institutions that arise and persist there that provide scripts for political processes. These institutional arrangements and the patterns and regularities they produce are the subject of the present chapter.