Public Choice Theory for Political Sociology - Springer Link

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1999

Public Choice Theory for Political Sociology Milan Z. Zafirovski

Some sociologists and other social scientists argue that political and other sociology should be founded on a venerable or nascent rational choice theory seen as a unifying paradigm. Such a paradigm is predicated upon the assumption that individuals are rational actors seeking predefined goals. The latter are subsumed under material interest, utility, profit, or wealth, with other ends being implicitly viewed as nonrational and thus inconsequential. The paradigm of rational choice is expected to bring theoretical unity in social science, by being the basis of economics as well as of public choice theory in political science and social exchange theory in sociology or social psychology. On this account, some sociologists attribute to and demand for rational choice theory a "paradigmatic privilege" (Abell, 1992; Goldthorpe, 1998; Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997) within sociology, including political sociology. Rational choice theory is attributed such a status on the grounds that explanation of social processes and structures, including political ones, is reached only when these are accounted for in terms of the rational economic actions of individuals. Although political processes are not admittedly merely extensions of economic ones, the conception of economically rational action is treated as a fruitful basis for social theory (Coleman, 1986:1-2). On the other hand, many sociologists have been concerned about the impact on political sociology of such applications of the rational choice/ economic approach to political phenomena, and more generally of sociologically limited frameworks for analyzing these phenomena. Moreover, some of them suggest that "we need to examine the degree to which this is a factor in the loss of political sociology [to political scientists and rational choice economists] which our discipline created and once dominated" (Light, 1992:909). Hence, the following question arises: Is a rational choice 465 © 1999 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

466

Zafirovski

theory for political (and comparative-historical) sociology conducive to the latter's revitalization, as argued by rational choice sociologists; or to its passing into oblivion, as warned by other sociologists? It is the task of this article to address this question. The article does this by reconsidering how appropriate and pertinent in theoretical and empirical terms a rational choice theory of politics is for political sociology, i.e., for understanding the social nature and structuration of political behaviors, processes, and systems (for recent reviews of "rational action theory for [general] sociology" or "sociological rational choice theory" as a whole, cf., Goldthorpe, 1998; Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997). The rational choice theory of politics is usually called public or social choice. As one of the main branches of rational action theory (especially) in economics and political science, public choice represents what its advocates and critics alike term an economic paradigm of and approach to politics (Buchanan, 1991a:31; Coleman, 1989:5-7; Dowding, 1991:17; Kiser and Hechter, 1991:1-3; Pappalardo, 1991:228; Schneider, 1994:180). Otherwise, the terms public and social choice theory are sometimes used interchangeably (Margolis, 1982; cf. also, Mueller, 1978), but are more often distinguished from one another. Still, most advocates of both versions of the rational choice theory of politics are economists, and this seems to make most differences between the two largely secondary and formal, rather than substantive or theoretical. Notably, most public and social choice theorists tend to construe the polity as a "political marketplace" (Cordes, 1997), i.e., a "network of exchange transactions" (Wagner, 1997), just as other rational choice advocates (Becker, 1976) depict the entire society as a universal market (as objected by Yeager, 1997). Thus much of public choice theory, in its extension of the transactional, cost-benefit "logic" of economic markets to processes in the political system, implies a "political Coase theorem." The latter posits that optimal political, just as economic, outcomes are attained when transaction costs are minimized (zero); i.e., political bargaining is made costless, given an initial allocation of political endowments assumed not to affect such outcomes. Therefore, the "political Coase theorem extends the analysis of private contracting in competitive markets to the sphere of politics [with] neglect of the initial distribution of political entitlements" (Vira, 1997:771-3). In a sense, such a "zero transaction cost model of the political market"—as proposed by American public choice theorists—of politics seems ironic, especially in the United States where the political process is far from conforming to such a model, as shown by exorbitant amounts spent in the elections. More generally, critics object that the political Coase theorem was originally proposed for producer-producer relations, so its extension to other forms of social (and even economic) relationships is questionable

Public Choice Theory for Political Sociology

467

at best. Thus a crucial objection is that the theorem, just as public choice theory as a whole, overlooks that politics is more than self-interested bargaining over private interest, and that there is an independent role for state action as well as for reasoned debate on ideological and ethical grounds. To use the logic of bargained exchange is to undermine the nature of the political process. In particular, not all political action is goal-seeking, and the process of political participation may be valued as much as its outcome. Politics includes not only self-interested bargaining but also analyzes power, state action, ideology and justice (Vira, 1997:771-2).

For that reason, it seems misplaced to explain political (and generally institutional) change as well as failures of such change by resorting to (political) transaction costs, neglecting the effects of such changes on the "politically weak and the powerless." Cynics and/or economists themselves may add that the reason for this common economic (de)construction of political phenomena lies in that "economists being who they are, the most common answer has been simply 'Mo[re] money!'" (Wintrobe, 1997:429; here the reference is made to the "new" economics of bureaucratic organization). Convergence of public and social choice upon a rigorous (or rigid) economic explanation of political life notwithstanding, in this article the focus is on public choice theory and its possibly "paradigmatic" status for political sociology. As an application of economic theorizing and methodology to politics, public choice theory is premised upon the argument that the main units of political analysis are "rational, choosing, economizing" individual agents. The satisfaction of their private preferences is seen as the raison d'etre of political or collective action. The assumption of the utility-maximizing behavior of individual actors supposedly makes possible the passage from self-interest to public interest, as well as the escape from the zero-model of politics. Political and generally social outcomes are conceived as emerging from an aggregation process involving multiple individuals rather than from some mysterious group mind (Buchanan, 1991a:31-6). Thus public choice theory copes with subjective preferences and their expression in various political choices, such as voting, rather than with objective conditions in the polity and society (Coleman, 1986:33-5). It claims the (re)discovery that individuals are "rational utility-maximizers in all of their behavioral capacities" (Buchanan, 1991a: 29), i.e., in economic as well as in political and social actions. And because people are ascribed a tendency to optimize their utilities (as consumers) and profits (as producers), economic, political, and other social institutions, as emergent outcomes of such individual actions, are expected to be designed in such a manner that these actions promote public interests. How will this be accomplished? The suggested procedure is the extension of the invisible hand of the market and the play of self-interest to the realm of the polity, by "reconstructing a political

468

Zafirovski

order that will channel the self-serving behavior of participants towards the common goal in a manner close to Adam Smith's with respect to the economic order" (Buchanan, 1991a:39-40). Ironically for a theory with perceived conservative underpinnings (De Long, 1996), this reconstruction would involve not short-term policy or legal adjustments but radical changes in political and social institutions, in the very constitution of society. Presumably, such changes would imply "constitutional public choice" (Mueller, 1997) in both micro- and macrosocial terms (Ostrom, 1989), and in the legal and societal senses alike. Such choice would involve constitutional contract or consensus, thus leading to the establishment of a "constitutional" socio-political order (Buchanan, 1991b), i.e., "constitutional democracy" (Mueller, 1996). Specifically, this "choice" pertains to the fundamental rule of determining members of a polity or a society, their basic rights and duties, and the mechanisms making collective decisions. The economic paradigm of politics postulates ("positive" public choice theory) or prescribes ("normative" theory) that such choice be founded on individual cost-benefit calculations, though mitigated or mediated by social norms and time or discount rates (Ostrom, 1989). Hence, all constitutions and other social institutions are assumed to emerge from individual-level benefits and costs and from the resulting anomalies. In turn, these institutions have the function of eliminating such anomalies at the aggregate level, though further dysfunctions may arise at this level as the result of institutional functioning (Frey and Eichenberger, 1989). An ideal political democracy is then defined by analogy to an ideal freemarket economy, as "an institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals endeavor to acquire political office through perfectly free competition for the votes of a broadly based electorate" (Becker, 1976:34-5). Political democracy is defined as a free competition for power or political exchange, just as the market is characterized as a free competition for wealth or economic exchange. Perfect competition is perceived as necessary not just to an ideal free enterprise system, but also to an ideal political system; hence the analysis of the former is extended to the latter. For example, just as consumers are assumed to have the same tastes optimized at equilibrium, so voters have supposedly the same preferences that can be maximized only by the equilibrium platform or the best political program. In consequence, as in economics, where economic welfare is maximized under free and pure competition with perfect information and prediction, in public choice theory social welfare is maximized under "free and frictionless political [competition] with full information" (Coleman, 1986:57-60; 79-80). Nonetheless, in some respects the political system as defined would not be totally isomorphic, as is sometimes admitted, to the market-economic system. A major reason for this is that while power


469

can lead to realization of material interests, these cannot be as readily reconverted into power in the polity as goods into money in the market (Coleman, 1986). The differentia specified of political and any other collective action is assumed to be the discrepancy between the public benefits and the private costs of individual participation, including voting. Since the costs exceed the gains to individuals, presumably there is no individual interest in participation, though there is public interest, as the sum total of the benefits exceeds the total costs. Thus, public choice theory conceives of collective action as an n-person non-cooperative game of the Prisoner's Dilemma type, where the players' choices are made independently and no external mechanism can be used to enforce cooperation over defection (Elster, 1989:32). Typically, it explains collective action in terms of private interests, not of collective ones, since group rationality is seen as insignificant in this regard. People are assumed or decreed to engage in political actions, including revolutions, on the basis of rational cost-benefit calculations rather than public purposes. Individual members of social collectivities, including political ones, are said to establish and sustain order in order to "satisfy their own private ends" (Hechter, Friedman, and Kanazawa, 1992:79-83). Some moderate versions of public or rational choice theory allow for alternative mechanisms and motives of collective action, such as social values and norms alongside utilitarian rationality and nonselfish motivations along with the selfish. But the second elements of these dichotomies are given an a priori methodological primacy. This is justified by the argument that to conceive that everyone acts rationally, not irrationally, read selfishly, not unselfishly, is logically consistent, so a "world in which everyone always acts for his selfish benefits" (Elster, 1989:34) is seen as more plausible than its opposite. Hence, utilitarian rationality or selfish motivation is predicted to bring first-order benefits to actors participating in collective action, while altruism and morality as second-order values are treated as being parasitic on the first. Actors are thus depicted as "rational egoists" in all social actions and systems, i.e., in both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Hechter, 1990). Still, the assumption of the primacy of selfish and outcome-oriented motivations in collective action is mitigated by viewing this assumption, like that of individualism (Boudon, 1982:204-5), as methodological rather than ontological (empirical). As such, this assumption would be without implications for the empirical frequency distribution of motivation, and thus another instance of the hypothetical, as if, critics (Frank 1997:122) would say, "head-in-sand" approach of public choice theory (as suggested by Opp, 1989:8-11). Such an assumption is rationalized by the claim that the analysis of collective, just as of individual, action ought to start with the "logically most simple type of motivation: rational, selfish, outcome-

470

Zafirovski

oriented behavior," and then insert more complex types only if the first proves itself insufficient (Elster, 1989:34-5). Although with a tendency to diverge, individual and social rationality would go hand in hand by consideration of the properties of individual rationality, such as the notational utility function or the real profit function. Presumably, rational nondictatorial social choice is feasible only by acknowledging individual tastes or goals as expressed in well-behaved—i.e., consistent, transitive, complete, independent—preference ordering for alternative courses of action (Mayston, 1993:123). The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In the following section, public choice theory's status of the relationship between private and social interest is reconsidered. The teleological specification and economic analogies found in public choice theory are examined in the next section. A section after that traces these tendencies to the original utilitarian roots of rational choice theory. Broad outlines of an alternative multilevel approach to political phenomena are then compared and contrasted with those characteristic of public choice theory, including its scope of application. In the ensuing section the degree of empirical relevance of public choice theory is reviewed. Finally, some broader ("thin") variants of public/rational choice theory in relation to its narrower ("thick") versions are discussed. Throughout, the focus is put on the pertinence of public choice theory for political sociology (for political science, cf. Friedman, 1995; Green and Shapiro, 1994; Miller, 1997; Mueller, 1997).

INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL INTERESTS: "PRIVATE VICES, PUBLIC VIRTUES" IN THE POLITY, REALLY? Unlike individual interests or private goods, social interests or public goods imply motivating forces that are different from and not reducible to the "materialistic ends" (Mueller, 1996:346) assumed by public choice theory, i.e., profit, rent, cost-benefit ratios, and generally economic utility. These forces include altruism, civic duty, group interest or related forms of intrinsic motivation (Frey, 1997), and generally, noneconomic motives including social prestige/influence and political power/domination. Since universal egoism and pan-utilitarianism tend to be socially self-destructive, altruism and public considerations can be treated as countervailing forces to the former, and therefore as the necessary conditions of social life. Put simply, no polity and society could emerge and persist in the "absence of such social motivation" (Margolis, 1982:11-3). In this sense, public choice theory can be considered a self-defeating prophecy in that it "will destroy


471

all of us in the name of reason and the wrong rational choice" (Denzin, 1990: 189). For example, the act of voting is treated by public choice theory as a paradox because under its hypothesis no rational (egoistic) individual would vote in the absence of selective incentives, such as material payoffs weighted against losses. But since in reality many people vote regardless of such payoffs, this political act can often be explained only by invoking noneconomic, social variables. As reported by research, these latter include public good, civic duty, normative context, community networks, group expectations, social participation, social learning, education, information, and so on. This contradicts the economic theory of politics postulating that people vote just because of cost-benefit considerations. In fact, given these social variables, no paradox of rational voting exists "because no one supposes that resources used for voting are used irrationally from a social point of view" (Margolis, 1982:82). This exposes the limitation of explaining voting by private benefits rather than by social variables, including reportedly public effects, group responsibility, or social expectations. Voting is thus an "essentially social act, and must reflect social rather than merely private preferences" (Margolis, 1982:25). Indeed, in the context of such social preferences a paradox of nonvoting rather than voting may be more sensible to posit. This is not because it is "cost-free" or "nonexpensive" to vote, as public choice theorists argue (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1996), invoking roll-off voting when the "marginal costs" of rolling-off the ballot are zero, with the "marginal benefits" being also minimal (unless the vote decides the outcome), thus simply restating the paradox of voting. Rather, it is because these social preferences and expectations regardless of any cost-benefit calculi make voting an expected and "normal" course of action versus nonvoting as "paradoxical." Weber's (1968:24-5) concept of valuerational action, as being "determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some [social] behavior, independently of its prospects of success," properly captures the essence of the act of voting induced by these social factors. The above suggests that the "rationality of voting is the Achilles' heel of rational choice theory" (Aldrich, 1997:373), with its reliance on cost-benefit calculi to explain and predict political behaviors and processes. In consequence, analysts recommend that "research combining abstract [economic] analysis with history and sociology is a high priority" (Enelow, 1997:179-80). Moreover, some urge that "if we are to have a satisfactory theory of public good contribution, we should have to abandon the assumption of utility-maximizing behavior" (Sugden, 1985:118). Overall, public choice theory often fails in the presence of nonprivate social "goods," including authority, liberty, peace, equality, justice or security, and other noneconomic, "invaluable goods" (Arrow, 1997). Construed

472

Zafirovski

as what its advocates with pride and joy call "economics of politics," public choice theory seems constitutionally unable to cope with situations, e.g., nationalism or patriotism, political protests and revolutionary actions, voting and charitable donations, in which individuals can contribute to the public good, though the material gains to them are inconsequential. Should such behavior be called nonrational or irrational? That is precisely what public choice theory suggests by calling it paradox, anomaly, or dilemma. In this, the theory follows neoclassical economics that terms the reversion of the law of demand, implied in conspicuous consumption, the Veblen paradox. Alternatively, public and generally rational choice theory resorts to ad hoc hypotheses to explain such behavior. One instance of such a procedure is dissolving all the underlying factors into an all-encompassing "utility" function with diverse and often exotic ingredients ("hard" and "soft," "thick and "thin"), including habits, routines, addictions, idiosyncratic preferences, emotions, and so on. Such a function is (mis)used in attempts at "accounting for tastes" in cost-benefit, utility-disutility terms (e.g., Becker, 1996; for recent critiques of such "accounting," cf. Elster, 1998; Hodgson, 1998). Relying on an "asymmetry of moral rhetoric" (Heckathorn, 1991), by stigmatizing such political behavior as irrational and relegating it to the domain of anomalies, most public choice theorists think that the problem is thereby solved. However, any such behavior, including individual voting and extravagant consumption, that defies economic principles, is better denoted nonutilitarian or noneconomizing rather than non-rational in the broad social sense. It can be non-rational only from the viewpoint of homo economicus, but not necessarily from that of homo sociologicus (Boudon, 1982). Economically irrational political behavior devoid of utility maximization can be completely rational from the social standpoint by virtue of pursuing definite though noneconomic ends, such as power, prestige, public duty, justice, equality, morality, and religious or ideological purity. The problem is restated or even aggravated rather than solved by relegating such behavior into the realm of paradoxes or dilemmas. Hence, it is a fallacy to term such behavior nonrational, because if actors behave in a "manner that [is] rational from a social but not an individual point of view, they are acting as if they had two different utility functions [individual and public]" (Margolis, 1982:1-5; 48-9). The existence of these two functions implies balance between self-interests and group-interests, and therefore between the resources devoted to private and social ends respectively. In many political situations the latter, as expressed in public good considerations, can be primary in relation to the former, as indicated by empirical studies reviewed later. Typically, public choice theory gratuitously postulates the existence of only self-interested tastes, motives, or purposes all others, including "envy,


473

guilt, rage, honor, sympathy, love" (Frank, 1990:61), being expunged, treated as secondary, or dissolved into the former. In following this course, especially by dissolving all these variables into subtle manifestations of selfinterest (as lamented by Elster, 1989), many public choice theorists neglect the fact that actors can pursue ends incongruent with their material interests, including wealth. But such behavior cannot be treated as "irrational behavior without regret" (Frank, 1990:84), but rather as rational or purposive in the nonutilitarian, social sense unless one believes public choice theorists that only pursuing utility or profit, via maximizing or satisficing, is rational action. As such, the public choice definition of rationality, rational political behavior in particular, as utility maximization (or satisficing) through consistent and precise cost-benefit calculations is hardly adequate. For this definition implies the dubious idea that only agents performing such operations, i.e., rational egoists (Hechter, 1990) qua "rational fools" (Sen, 1977) or "foolish rationalists" (Agodi, 1991), are really rational social actors, and all others are irrational. But, "unless one argues that social motivation is irrational unless formulated in terms of self-interest, there [is] something wrong with the conventional definition: it is too narrow [so the problem is to define] what [is] rationality when we allow for social as well as for selfinterested motivation" (Margolis, 1982:14-6, 17-21). Most public choice theorists would rather avoid or "solve" the problem by discarding social considerations as irrational and the ensuing actions as perplexing anomalies (Pappalardo, 1991). The latter, however, can be eliminated only by allowing for intrinsically motivated acts (Frey, 1997), i.e., for other-interested or disinterested behavior, more particularly public preferences and ends (Miller, 1997). In consequence, what public choice theory postulates to be the rational political conduct of a self-interested "economic man" seems contradicted by everyday observation, thereby appearing "positively bizarre" (Margolis, 1982:17-21). Thus, the assumed super-rationality of "economic man" turns out to be the practical irrationality of an "optimizing automaton" (Rosen, 1997) as a "asocial moron" (DiMaggio, 1990). However, without the concept of such an economic mutant or genus (as joked by Friedman, 1995:3), i.e., of "an anemic one-dimensional homo economicus" (Bowles, 1998:78) on which it is "parasitic" (Elster, 1989), public choice theory for political sociology is altered "beyond recognition" (Green and Shapiro, 1994). In consequence, it oftentimes appears as if rational public choice theory had no "rational choice" other than transmutation away from such a concept of economic mutant, with the process effectively culminating in "euthanasia," given its differentia specifica as an application of economic principles and methods to political behavior. No wonder that what critics call the "obsession" with the formalist-economistic theory of public or social choice, with

Zafirovski

474

social choice theory being more formal, often looks like an "instance of bounded vision" (Gerrard, 1993:59-65), espousing an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality" (J. M. Clark, 1918). (SPURIOUS) TELEOLOGICAL IMPUTATION The a priori imputation of utilitarian purposes to political and other social action may often be conceptually inadequate and empirically unrealistic. Imputing exclusively material preferences and economic motives to political actors, rational public choice theory, more precisely its "thick," "hard" version, treat these as given explanatory variables or causes of their actions, within "variations in structural constraints" (Kiser and Hechter, 1991). Such a treatment implies a teleology at the individual (and organizational) level, and thereby by a curious determination of political actions assumed to be "caused" by their unintended effects (Coleman, 1990). This approach seems to involve the fallacy of inverse causation, i.e., that the consequences of action determine its factors. Ironically, it also involves internal contradictions with the general rational choice argument that anticipated, intended or desired, i.e., what orthodox macro-economists call "rational expectations," rather than unintended future state of affairs," are engines for action. In addition, this teleological imputation is performed without explicitly explaining how these purposes of political action originated in the first place. Are they contingent on social-structural (especially institutional), cultural, and historical conditions that constrain individual political behavior, or are they invariant? By assuming given sociopolitical goals and values, themselves seen as extensions of economic tastes or preferences, public choice theory views them as invariant (parametric) or exogenous to such conditions. This is a rather curious argument. It can be questioned on the grounds that just as individual political behavior, these values are endogenous to and contingent on a particular sociopolitical system. As such, they are not only economic, but also noneconomic in that they include the seeking both of material and ideal interests. Public choice theory thereby commits a double fallacy: first, that the goals of political behavior are solely utilitarian-economic in character (as objected by Friedman, 1995); and, second, that such goals are invariant under varying political, social-cultural conditions, and historical circumstances. This fallacy in reflected, for example, in the treatment of state autonomy, the concept ostensibly devised to counteract the stringency of the Marxian assumption of an epiphenomenal state. But this concept can also be used against the equally stringent utilitarian premise of state formation


475

and operation. Thus to argue that the autonomy of the state, as measured by the relative power of rulers vis-a-vis society, is determined by the degree of its financial dependence on power-subjects boils down to a fiscal proposition, the greater state revenue sources other than taxation, the higher the power of the state (Kiser and Hechter, 1991). This seems to make the rational choice theory of politics no more than public finance analysis, albeit with a Machiavellian-Hobessian bent (as implied by Musgrave, 1997). This proposition may imply that, in the limiting case, state autonomy resides in the purse or treasury, in the discretionary ability to print money or fix interest rates, rather than resorting to the fiscal device of complicated and costly collection of taxes from the subjects, an ultimate monetarist implication of the utilitarian premise. Fiscal despotic extortion or expropriation is another limiting implication, although such predation is ruled out on the basis that in the long-run it may not be rational for autocratic rulers (McGuire and Olson, 1996). Other nonfiscal, nonmonetarist or noneconomic, endogenous as well as exogenous, determinants of state autonomy are usually overlooked or played down in public choice models. As a result, such models of political behavior suffer from a serious mis-specification error. The same bias can, for example, be found in purely economic models trying to predict the outcome of U.S. Presidential elections (Fair, 1996). In general, models of political behavior that incorporate only economic-rational factors, excluding the social, as explanatory variables of such behavior can be considered mis-specified. This applies both to models of political participation and to those of political alienation (Kahn and Mason, 1987). When public choice models are not oblivious of the existence of such noneconomic determinants, they fail to realize the need for different research designs (Walters and Rubinson, 1984) to analyze the effects on state actions, including budget outcomes, i.e., deficits (Hicks, 1984), and political processes of social variables other than the economic. The determinants of political behavior, including government conduct or individual voting, by virtue of being financial as well as nonfinancial, may prove to be more complex than the public choice view suggests. In consequence, the literal application of economic ("rational choice") theory to the polity can engender more conceptual and methodological "pathologies" (as termed by Green and Shapiro, 1994) than they solve. THE "UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS" OF ANALOGY AND METAPHOR Rational public choice theory tends to traverse the easy path of tenuous economic analogies and conceptualizations, e.g., political markets, political

476

Zafirovski

perfect competition, political exchange, political benefits and costs (including political transaction costs) as well as political or electoral cycles, political inflation and deflation, and so on, rather than the sensible path of exploration of the multifaceted political process within a social framework. The latter is in turn the path followed by the classical tradition of political sociology. In essence, political life, including the democratic process, cannot satisfactorily be explained as a mere extension of economic competition in the market as is done in public choice theory by Downs et al., (mis)applying Schumpeter's (1950) definition of democracy as a free competition for political power. Apparently, political life cannot always be subsumed under competition, for it also involves opposite processes, including cooperation, coalition formation, collusion, and the like. Even conceived as competition, it is far from being entirely free political competition supposedly homologous to perfect market competition. Even the model of perfect market competition has been challenged in economics by imperfect or monopolistic competition theories since the 1930s. In terms of these theories, democratic processes may better be characterized as monopolistic or imperfect competition in the political arena, given the salience of differential social position, power, wealth, influence, prestige and other endowments of political actors. Although one might say that in the economic market an actor's one dollar counts just as any other actor's one dollar, albeit this is questionable as the marginal utility of money is not the same for individuals with different levels of income, the situation is not that simple in the political "marketplace" (Cordes, 1997). No doubt, in a democracy every individual's voice (vote) counts equally in the formal (accounting) sense in contrast to an autocracy or aristocracy. But this is not necessarily so in the substantial sense because of the differentials in initial political and other individual or collective endowments. Thus, the formal and substantive rationality of the democratic political system do not always coincide, even perhaps less than they do in the market-economic realm. This is evidenced by various abuses and deformations of formal democratic procedures, often escalating in the suspension or breakdown of democracy in favor of authoritarian practices or totalitarian rule. In this sense, the only plausible analogy is that just as the excesses of free-market competition may lead to monopolistic tendencies and monopolies, so can such excesses of free political competition precipitate though not directly cause authoritarian tendencies and totalitarian rule. Thus, even if one grants that political life can be conceptualized as being isomorphic to economic competition, this does not mean that the former is driven by the same motivational factors as the latter, by the profitmotive or egoism as claimed by public choice theory. Egoism is far from


477

being absent or irrelevant in the polity. However, it is only one of a set of determinants of political behavior, a set also including power, domination, influence, social prestige, civic duty, altruism, approval, justice, religion, ideology, morality, and so on. By reducing all these to a single rational determinant, i.e., utility/profit, or treating them as nonrational, public choice theory retards rather than promotes our understanding of the complex motivational dynamics of political life. No wonder some economists protest against such "economic reductionism" (Hodgson, 1998) that tends to subsume, via unbearably easy simplifications, analogies, and metaphors, the whole polity and society to an omnipresent and overarching "market." As Yeager (1997:161) notes in reference to the intellectual marketplace (cf. Rosen, 1997:151), at least two things are wrong with such appeals to the 'market'. First, the metaphorical academic market is less responsive to the wishes of whoever the ultimate consumer may be than is the actual market in goods and services. Appealing to the metaphorical market test is a variant of the fallacy of argumentum ad populum. A second objection... is deeper than the metaphor is defective. Since when, anyway, was the market, even the actual business market, the arbiter of excellence in consumer goods, literature, art, music, science, or scholarship? Since when does the market decide truth and beauty? (Yeager, 1997:161).

In sum, the problem with such economic reductionism is, as even some public or/and social choice pioneers admonish, that "the market is one system; the polity, another" (Arrow, 1997:765). In particular, they warn that "too much of public-choice analysis—especially in the United States— has been in the Hobbesian image of Leviathan with an ever-growing and abusive government. Voting outcomes may lead to deficient as well as excessive budgets, bureaucrats may be public-spirited as well as selfish, and political leadership constructive as well as destructive" (Musgrave, 1997:156). All this often generates a certain feeling of "unbearable lightness of [political and social] existence" associated with economic reductions, analogies, and metaphors employed by public (and generally rational) choice theory. The above considerations point to a serious, if not unsolvable, problem of rational public choice theory. In depicting political and entire social life as the pursuit of utility, public choice theory might achieve simplicity and predictability: this is accomplished at a heavy price due to its "original sin," the definition of rationality as an exclusively economic or utilitarian rationality. Following this stringent definition, its proponents resort to tenuous argumentation in order to demonstrate that it is rational for political actors to optimize utility, wealth or profit, but not power, influence or prestige, all relegated to the residual category or "error term" of nonrational or irrational. Why would it be less rational for the state or any other political actor to seek the latter objectives rather than the former? Public choice

Zafirovski

478

theory is unable to answer this question even by resorting to a reduction of all these goals to utility-maximization as the deus ex machina. Within the "thick-rational" (Friedman, 1995) world of public choice theory, everything seems as if it were just a form or an effect of the operation of this perpetuum mobile, and we are all utility optimizers, economists, or entrepreneurs (Wittman, 1995). Altruism, for instance, is routinely dissolved into an inverted form of egoism, against which some moderate rational choice theorists express misgivings (Elster, 1989; Margolis, 1982). Ultimately it appears as if nothing else exists or matters in such a Huxleyian Brave New World of "rational construction of society" (Coleman, 1993) in the form of universal soma consumption or utility optimization other than different varieties of rational egoism and egoists in "all of their behavioral capacities," including those of political officials and citizens. Thereby such a sociopolitical world tends to achieve utilitarian, and possibly authoritarian closure. The latter outcome is likely insofar as the (mis)conception of the human actor as an "utility-maximizer based on fixed preference functions itself denies free will and choice [for] within such a deterministic machinery [we] find it difficult to find any place for real choice" (Hodgson, 1998:179). The approach of political sociology is able to overcome these ontological and epistemological problems of public choice theory. This is done by extending the notion of rationality to embrace the consistent pursuit of any given goal and value, utilitarian or not, perceived as rational by the political actor, and so by including aim-rational and value-rational action. Thus, in the political arena the pursuit of power and domination, authority and discipline, order and stability, justice and equality, social prestige and approval, morality and religious salvation, ideological consensus and social integration, peace and war, normative conformity and dissidence, altruism and generosity is often as rational in sociological terms as utility maximization, material interest, rent-seeking or profit-making. In doing so, such a sociological perspective dispenses with the narrow utilitarian conception of individual and collective rationality, and thus situates rational public choice theory in its proper place, an indispensable, but only partial and auxiliary, depiction and explanation of sociopolitical processes. ECONOMIC REDUCTIONISM VERSUS SOCIAL MULTI-DIMENSIONALITY Public choice theory typically neglects the fact that power is a pivotal political category and thus the focal point for political sociology, rather than utility, cost-benefit ratios, money, wealth, and other economic maximands which are the central variables of orthodox economics and its various


479

rational choice extensions. Power and other noneconomic variables can be reduced to economic ones only by a tortuous logic devoid of conceptual or empirical plausibility, by making economic variables such as "utility," formally universal and therefore useless for substantive theory and empirical research (Knoke, 1988). As an antidote to the unidimensional, utilitarian approach of public choice theory, political sociology offers a multidimensional perspective on power and other sociopolitical phenomena. This perspective incorporates economic variables, but only as elements of the social setting of political processes, as part of the story rather than the whole story. In relation to the one-sided economic emphasis of public choice theory, political sociology can provide more valid insights into, for instance, the relationships between modern society and the state, the degree of autonomy of the state, political (in)stability, political participation and alienation, antidemocratic tendencies and regimes, and so on. The multidimensionality of political sociology deepens and extends our understanding of sociopolitical life, whereas simplistic assumptions parade as "ultimate" explanations in public choice theory. At a general epistemological level, both public choice theory and political sociology share the premise that political facts can be understood only within a particular (meta-)theoretical frame of reference. However, the difference between the two resides in the nature and empirical adequacy of this framework. On this account, with its poor performance in terms of multidimensionality and empirical adequacy, public choice theory is inferior to political sociology as an explanation of the social settings of political phenomena. Because of its reduction of all sociopolitical phenomena, including the state, to extensions of utilitarian calculation, public choice theory is poorly positioned to highlight the relationship between society, the polity and the state. Conducting this reduction indiscriminately, public choice theory displays a trained incapacity to distinguish not only between the political system and the government, but also between various political actors and institutions. All these are summarily lumped together under the heading of "rational" (self-interested) political players and organizations. For public choice theory, all political actors, just like market actors, are subject to the rule of economic efficiency, i.e., profit maximization and cost minimization, as implied in the political Coase theorem based on the concept of transaction costs (mis)applied from the market to the polity, despite these two being admittedly (Arrow, 1997) different systems. It does not matter whether these actors are governments or trade unions, parties or lobbying groups, corporate political action committees or charities, politicians or voters, dictators or elected officials, political or moral leaders, or party machines or volunteers. More generally, rational choice theory is incapable of substantive dis-

480

Zafirovski

tinctions between society, the economy, or the state nor between economic and extra-economic realms. The entire society, including the state and the polity, is conceptualized as being populated by cost-benefit calculating robots or monads (Frank, 1996:117). The autonomous existence of the state, polity and all noneconomic "super-structure" is thereby denied in an almost identical fashion as it is by orthodox materialist conceptions. Presumably utilitarian/economic behavior in the polity is rational (the "base"), while non-utilitarian behavior is non-rational (the "superstructure"). In fact, public choice theory goes even further than historical materialism has ever gone. Historical materialism implies only a societal hierarchy of economic and noneconomic domains. Public choice theory postulates a complete dissolution of society, the polity, and the state into the economy and utility, thus bringing about their conceptual extinction. In public choice theory society and the polity do not exist as distinct from or autonomous vis-a-vis the economy. What ostensibly exist are merely various spheres in which the economic law of utility maximization operates and to which the economic paradigm can be applied. Nothing in society and the polity is regarded as capable of escaping the dictates of this law, and all social and political behavior is seen as accounted for by the economic paradigm. Thus public choice theory can "explain" any political behavior, including an individual's seeking political office (say, an American billionaire's run for the presidency), only as a consistent profit-maximization drive, a rational choice between alternative courses of action directed to that goal: staying out of politics in this case is no longer seen as rational (profitable) relative to holding an office. This exposes public choice theory's built-in inability to consider factors of political behavior other than economic ones, thereby offering limited grounds to sensibly understand such behavior. Political sociology provides a remedy to this self-inflicted theoretical wreckage of public choice theory by developing a fuller sense of differentiation between diverse political actors and institutions, as well as between the different types and motivations of sociopolitical behavior. Whereas public choice theory conceptualizes political actors and their actions as rational in the utilitarian sense only, political sociology makes subtle discriminations between utilitarian-rational, nonutilitarian-rational, traditional, and emotional actions. By defining human rationality as narrow economic rationality, rational public choice theory is completely alien to the notion that rationality, individual or social, can also be noneconomic. In Weber's (1968:24-7) terms, rationality takes forms of Zweckrationalitat (instrumental-rationality) and Wertrationalitat (value-rationality). The latter concept is to be understood in a broader sense than in Weber's original definition. It includes the pursuit of noneconomic ends, not just religious, ethical, aesthetical, ideological, or any ideal values, but also power, domina-


481

tion, influence, or social prestige, all of which are not reducible to economic values. At this juncture, public choice theory is helpless to explain why the striving for power and prestige—as well as religious salvation, justice, or moral righteousness—is nonrational or less rational than seeking profit and economic utility, when such goals are pursued by individual or collective actors in their political behavior. Neither cannot it come to terms with the fact that economic ends are often only immediate or intermediate goals, and as such, means to other long-run or ultimate non-economic values, as paradigmatically established in classical (political) sociology by Durkheim, Pareto, Simmel, Weber, Veblen and others. The possibility that political actors may want profit or wealth not for their own sake, but to achieve power and status, to attain religious grace, equity or ethical punctuality, i.e., that instrumental-rationality can become value-rationality, seems out of the analytical grasp of rational public choice theory. On the other hand, the above discussion in no way signifies that such a process necessarily develops or that opposing processes are absent, as when the pursuit of noneconomic goals, including power, can be instrumental to pursuing economic ends, such as rent-seeking. Even in such cases, however, public choice theory provides only partial economic-financial information on why political actors, including governments, behave the way they do. For more complete information, one has to resort to a sociological perspective by taking into account all the relevant social variables, economic as well as noneconomic, of political behavior. But, unlike public choice theory imperialistic claims that its explanations are self-sufficient are not normally made by political sociology. Political sociology is acutely aware that political behavior may be a function not only of social determinants, but also of nonsocial (psychological, geographic, biological, or ecological) factors outside of its purview. The possibility that the utilitarian paradigm of rational choice may be valid only with reference to the conceptually and empirically delimited terrain of the economy and to a lesser extent to the polity and other noneconomic realms is often overlooked in the theory. In this regard, public choice theory is too imperialistic to admit any restrictions to the scope of operation of its utilitarian law and of validity of its paradigm, it is a "theory of everything [under the sun]" (Hodgson, 1998:168), which ostensibly "explains everything and nothing" (Ackerman, 1997:663). Public choice theory's conceptual imperialism poses serious epistemological problems, insofar as a lack of specific limits to a theory's scope can mean that it has no definite realm of application at all. This has been the perennial problem of modern rational choice theory, including its public choice version, since its inception in or resurrection of Benthamite utilitarianism. This problem could be solved by relaxing the stringency and universality of the perpetuum

482

Zafirovski

mobile of utility optimizing (or satisficing) behavior by delimiting its scope only to its original economic sphere. But this solution may end this theory as we know it; i.e., it "belongs to the species of remedy which cures the disease by killing the patient" (Keynes, 1960:324). This leads to the ultimate paradox of public choice theory as an ostensibly universalistic political conception: if it is to be plausible, it has to redefine its theoretical scope, but by doing so it spells its own ruin. This prospect apparently exerts a strong deterrence effect on the efforts of public choice theorists to specify the scope of their theory as I have suggested. For by performing this necessary epistemological task, they seem to fear losing any rationale for their theory's existence that can justified by the rigorous application of the economic approach to political and, indeed, all human behavior. Thus, given the alternatives of giving plausibility to their theory by limiting its scope or of treating as a "sacred precinct" (Schumpeter, 1950:84) a utilitarian deus ex machina, that is an over-arching utility function, that "explains," by its presumed universal scope, everything, they choose the second alternative. This may well be a "rational choice" from an ontological perspective, justifying the continuous existence and proliferation of particular theories and theorists within the commonly shared economic paradigm of politics and society. But it does not seem rational from the standpoint of the requirements of an epistemological perspective of theoretical adequacy and the specification of the empirical range to which a theory applies. AN APPLICATION OF PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY: ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY AND LEGITIMACY OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS Due to its pervasive utilitarian bias, public choice theory tends to blur analytically relevant distinctions between the effectiveness and the legitimacy of political institutions, especially of the state. The overall effectiveness of the state and any other political organization is routinely equalized to its economic efficiency. Then, as exemplified by the extension of the economic theory of business cycles to the political realm, the government's economic effectiveness is regarded as necessarily generating its legitimacy. This may be questioned on several grounds. Although economic efficiency, as measured by various indicators of income growth, unemployment, or inflation, is an important element of the effectiveness of governments, only by a reductionist logic can the two be equated. The effectiveness of the state includes economic as well as noneconomic components such as liberty, peace, stability, security, opportunity, equality, justice, and so on. Moreover, the assumption that the economic efficacy of the state always engenders legitimacy has certain antidemocratic implications, for instance, the Nazis


483

and the other fascist regimes in Europe were enviably efficacious in economic terms. The assumption also misses a crucial conceptual point: the effectiveness of political institutions, including governments and parties, is largely an endogenous political phenomenon concerning intrapolity relations, but their legitimacy is exogenous. As such, legitimacy refers to the social (de) construction of the reality and morality of political institutions, the games they play, and the rules by which they play them. Hence, legitimacy is an element of the political culture of a society, not of the political system in the strict sense (Lehman, 1988). Viewing the concept of political culture or public sphere in political sociology, especially in Parsons and Habermas, as less political and cultural and more social than the term suggests reflects the analytical dichotomy between the state/the polity and the civil society/the economy (Somers, 1995). This view also implies the distinctiveness of political sociology as the study of the relationships of these two spheres from political science, dealing mostly with the first. By contrast, public choice theory seems incapable of making substantial distinctions between the two spheres. The polity is dissolved into an appendix of the market economy, just as vulgar Marxism reduces the political system to an epiphenomenon of the economic system. Locating the sociological concept of political culture closer to society than to the polity is path of the "sociology of apolitical" coping with the exclusion of politics from social or private life. But this exclusion, as exemplified in voting abstention and other forms of political alienation (Kahn and Mason, 1987), need not always be caused, contrary to public choice claims, by materialist calculations, but by social and even ideal considerations, such as the moral distaste for politics, confrontations, and zealotry (Gilliatt, 1995). Theoretical propositions concerning the tenuous relationship between state economic performance and democratic legitimation have been supported by some empirical studies. For instance, poor state performance does not necessarily, contrary to the "rational expectations" of public choice, and, for that matter, Marxist, theorists, lead to general weakening of support for democratic institutions (legitimation crisis), but only to a decline of confidence in the incumbent government (Weil, 1989). This implies that citizens as political actors attributing legitimacy or illegitimacy to such institutions do not always evaluate them according to what material benefits they derive from them. They also consider "ideal" criteria, including political liberties, the overall political climate, sensible political alternatives, responsiveness to political choices, preservation of individual and collective identity, and the capacity for adaptation and change. Whereas political sociology takes into account all these elements of political effectiveness, legitimacy, and behavior, public choice theory considers only, or reduces all these to, the economic. In this sense, public choice theory

484

Zafirovski

offers only a partial and often false depiction of political legitimacy and its determinants. It is not surprising that such a market model of politics receives at best scant empirical support, both when the political system, including the state, is conceived as characterized by free competition or by monopolistic (hegemonic) competition (Allen, 1991), as I will discuss in the next section. PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY AND EMPIRICAL RESEARCH Many rational choice theorists have acknowledged that there is a significant stream of empirical research that does not support or even falsifies their theory. Still, most of them do not see this as a sufficient reason for abandoning the theory, arguing that no better alternative is yet available. In spite of some recent attempts (Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997) to find empirical support for rational choice theory, many historical and empirical studies provide only slim or no corroboration for the theory, as illustrated below by the following selection of examples. Attention is centered on the research pertaining to public choice theory for political sociology. Empirical research as well as casual observation and common sense often expose the anomalies or paradoxes engendered by public or social choice theory understood as the economic model of politics. Such paradoxes include individual voting, other political participation, public contribution—including charitable donations (for historical analyses of philanthropy in Russia and United States, cf. Dinnelo, 1998; Hewa, 1998)—selective incentives, i.e., intrinsic motivation for political behavior, and so on. For example, contrary to the individualistic explanation of (non)voting given by public choice theory, social participation is found to be an important predictor of voting turnout (Olsen, 1972). Hence, public choice theory, by transferring the economic concept of rationality as the pursuit of individual material interests to politics, fails to account for high levels of turnout in many elections, since it ignores sociological factors such as citizen duty or civic responsibility, which are often crucial in this respect (Schneider, 1994). Thus research indicates that social groups and expectations play a major role in the individual's decision to participate or not in elections. Voting can be rational in terms of these social variables, though not in terms of individual costs-benefits (Schram and Winden, 1994). In regard to participation in social movements, empirical evidence is also not very supportive of the rational choice model of collective and political action. Research reports that not just organization, rational planing, and cost-benefit calculations, but also spontaneity, emergence, and generally nonrational elements are important predictors of such participation,


485

for example the civil rights movement (Killian, 1984). Other studies of social movement participation have shown that expectations of others' participation rather than individual calculations act as self-fulfilling prophecies through collective definitions of situations. And in accordance with the Thomas theorem (Merton, 1995), though these expectations need not be real, they are real in their consequences; hence calculations involving freerider problems become almost irrelevant (Klandermans, 1984). The secondary relevance of the free-rider problem has been confirmed repeatedly, for instance in the study of the Dutch peace movement of 1985 (Orema and Klandermans, 1994). Alternatively, many factors in social movement participation are the formation of mobilization potentials, the activation of recruitment networks, the emergence of motivation to participate, and the removal of obstacles to participation, whereas variables that explain nonparticipation in collective action—such as mass demonstrations—are lack of sympathy for a movement, not being targeted by mobilization attempts, lack of motivation, and the presence of obstacles (Klandermans and Orema, 1987). Empirical support for the rational choice model of collective action has also been weakened by the reported relevance in social movement participation of the process of framing based on sociocultural variables (symbols, social constructions, perceptions, or cues) that are different from rational individual calculations. For example, frame-alignment processes such as frame-bridging, frame-amplification, frame-extension, and frametransformation often become necessary prerequisites for participation in social movements and politics (Snow, Rochford, Worden and Benford, 1986). Even some researchers starting from the public choice position stress the importance of this sociocultural process and report, as in the study of participation in rebellious collective actions in New York and Hamburg, that collective actions are chosen rationally for social or group reasons, rather than for purely individual or economic motives (Opp, 1988). Other researchers show that the rational choice of movement participation ultimately hinges not so much on individual cost-benefit calculations as on group, nonrational variables, such as specific recruiting efforts, the successful link of movement and group identity, support for that link from the members of the group, and lack of opposition from others (McAdam and Paulsen, 1993). Evidence on strikes as a particular form of collective action is also not encouraging for public choice theory, in particular for its bargaining model of trade unions. It has been found that the workers in strike actions do not perform consistent and accurate cost-benefit calculations, and therefore the predictions of the rational choice model of bargaining are not fulfilled (Snyder, 1975). Strikes are reported to actually represent not only economic

486

Zafirovski

costs to employers ("local threat to profits") but also sociopolitical ones, i.e., "a general threat to the social order" (Perrone, 1984). This is indicated by the positional power, as the power to potentially disrupt the social system as a whole. Thus these collective actions are not just an instrument of economic bargaining, but a political weapon as well: their agents (unions) are not only economic bargaining units also but political actors. The structural relations of various spheres of production reportedly determine the level of the positional power of labor as well as management. The level of such power has, in turn, definite effects on labor-management outcomes, including labor organizational capacity, militancy, and economic position (Wallace, Griffin, and Rubin, 1989). The linkages of social conflictespecially class struggles, and social movements, as well as the countermobilization of adversaries—have therefore often been key variables in accounting for union membership and mobilization (Griffin, Wallace, and Rubin, 1986). Furthermore, the rational choice model of collective action is of particularly dubious explanatory value with respect to the behavior of various noneconomic aggregates, above all cultural groups, including ethnic, racial, religious and artistic groups (cf. Dex, 1985). Public choice theory thereby implausibly dissolves all values and preferences of such groups into money and ordered utilities, and all groups and structures into business units and markets (Wilier, 1992:72). In this connection, some researchers have shown that neither ethnic competition nor its mutation into open ethnic conflict is driven by exclusively economic factors. Rather, social factors, especially sociocultural (de)construction of ethnic relations perceived as (un)fair and a social context characterized by ethnic independence, also have to be taken into account (Belanger and Pinard, 1991). A case in point is provided by ethnic and related conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (Dahrendorf, 1990; Tiryakian, 1995). The analysis of these conflicts once again raises questions of the adequacy of explanation and prediction in the study of political phenomena. In general, a strong line of defense of the exponents of rational choice theory has always been the claim of its superior explanatory, especially predictive, power compared with its competitors. However, the predictive ability of its public choice variant has often been shown to be far less robust relative not only to the rational expectations of its defenders, but also to that of competing theories. For instance, public choice theory was unable to explain, much less predict the revolutionary breakdown of the communist political systems of Eastern Europe during 1989-91. In this case, some choice theorists (Hechter, 1995) find solace in the newly acquired wisdom that revolutions and similar sociopolitical phenomena are not after all predictable with any "high degree of precision." In an ironic twist of this argument, this implies a retreat


487

from the initial public choice position that postulated exactly the opposite conclusion (as noted by Friedman, 1995:12-3). Others (cf. Coleman, 1995) do not lose faith in their theory's explanatory and predictive potency, arguing that such phenomena are nonetheless "contingently predictable." The contingency is assumed to be the behavior (the use of force) of the repressive regime. As a result, revolutionary events in Eastern Europe are regarded as "far less puzzling and far more predictable." Again ironically, this view is closer to Pareto-Mosca-Michels-Sorel's theories of the preeminent role of force in politics and society than it is to public choice theory. Still others (cf. Kuran, 1995) resort to ambitious pseudo-rational choice explanations of revolutionary upheavals such as that of preference falsification. This explanation advances the existence of a gap between private and public political opinions that is based upon rational cost-benefit calculations, treating such a gap as the key obstacle to accurate prediction of these and similar events. Resembling Merton's pluralistic ignorance and reduced to the common-sensical fear factor rationalized or "quantified" by such economic calculations, this conception seems a pos-factual subterfuge, "wisdom after the battle," and thus a typical rationalist reconstruction or rationalization. It is therefore far from being a resolution of the explanatory and predictive cul-de-sac of public choice theory. As even some sympathetic to it imply (Coleman, 1995), preference falsification theory is inapplicable to cases like Poland, Hungary or Yugoslavia, where the gap between "private truths" and "public lies" was largely negligible; and hence not an explanation for the failure to explain and predict the ensuing revolutionary convulsions (cf. also Kim and Bearman, 1997). By contrast to a microscopic, ahistorical, and pseudo-utilitarian public choice theory, those with opposite properties, such as a macro-structural, geopolitical-historical theory, appear to be in a better position to provide valid political and historical explanations and predictions, including the Communist regimes' collapse. Specifically, macrohistorical predictions are possible, provided both a theory and empirical information are available. Other predictions and explanations of the Soviet breakup lack theoretical validity. The precision of macropolitical prediction is limited to a range of decades, but state breakdown and revolution occur in a narrower time period. The transfer of power happens in a mass mobilization lasting a few days, thus creating the illusion that spontaneous popular will causes macropolitical change and masking the structural shifts that make the change possible" (Collins, 1995:1552).

Relative to such macropolitical predictions, public choice predictions seem devoid of theoretical validity as well as empirical-historical realism. Moreover, building such "invariant models" of revolution and political processes often requires further elaborations (Foran, 1993; Tilly, 1995). Thus even the putatively compelling defense of public choice theory as a presumably

488

Zafirovski

superior explanatory and prediction tool often crumbles in the face of complex political and social realities, including the recent revolutionary events in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In sum, the above examination suggests that rational choice explanations and predictions of political and other social (including economic) processes and events "in terms of given, rational individuals are not as robust as is often supposed" (Hodgson, 1998:175). "THICK" VERSUS "THIN" MODELS OF RATIONAL PUBLIC CHOICE The discussion thus far has applied mostly to "thick," "hard-core" narrow public choice theory in the sense of an economic theory of politics. One may wonder if "thin," "soft," broader versions of public choice theory are perhaps more satisfactory (Goldthorpe, 1998; Opp, 1989; Ostrom, 1989). Presumably, "thick" models are defined by an ex ante specification of actor goals, and "thin" models by agnosticism in this regard (Ferejohn, 1991; also Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997). Typically, the first models draw a 'thickrational picture [of human actors as representatives] of the species Homo economicus" (Friedman, 1995:3), thus being "thick" and "hard" in economic terms. As hinted earlier, a main problem with thick-rationality models is their low degree of explanatory power. And to the extent that they assume only "hard," economic explanatory variables (purposes of action), they even neglect the admonition coming from neoclassical economics that "there are no economic ends, but only economic and non-economic ways of attainment of given ends" (Robbins, 1952:145). On the other hand, thin-rationality models face risks of tautology by their subsummation of all human ends and values, "hard" and "soft" (Opp, 1989), "thick" and "thin" (Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997), "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" (Frey, 1997), under an all-encompassing utility function. Such models tend to be conducive to a universalist theory of all political and social phenomena. However, as I have already suggested, the question arises as to whether such a theory, with an ostensibly infinite and deliberately indefinite domain of validity, may not eventually become one with a "trained incapacity" to plausibly account for anything definite, including concrete political phenomena. This is a critical challenge for seemingly more plausible "thin" public (and generally rational choice) models, which will have to reconsider such a concept of "mono-utility" (Etzioni, 1990). The question (Margolis, 1982:16-7) is simple: is everything really "utility" (whatever that means), and therefore every political and social behavior "rational"?, if utility maximization equals rationality.


489

Critics have charged that only by a "tortuous logic" (Knoke, 1988) can the quest for, say, status, and power and other noneconomic goals be lumped together into a "utility" function, alongside wealth seeking and other economic utilities. The "problem is that a great deal of individual behavior is not explicable in wealth [utility] maximization terms [and] some behavior [is] better explained as the product of status or power maximization" (Hechter, 1992:217). Moreover, the pursuit of status, power and other non-economic "utilities" can come in conflict with seeking money, wealth, profit and economic "utility." For example, spending wealth on gaining social prestige or political power to the point of becoming economically "broke" (as businessmen seeking political offices in the United States) does not seem to generate the same kind of "utility" as using that wealth to make money profit, by investing it, say, in Wall-Street. Similarly, the rich altruist who gives away his/her money to significant others or to society, thereby becoming destitute, can hardly be assumed to have the same "utility" function ("happiness") as an equally wealthy egoist who does exactly the opposite, i.e., investing for private profit or, in the case of proverbial misers, hoarding his/her wealth. To call the first function "psychic income," and the second "money income," is misleading, because the two are incommensurable variables. The first is an instance of economically "invaluable goods" (Arrow, 1997) and/or emotions (Elster, 1998) that cannot be conceived in terms of or explained by cost-benefit ratios (as is done by Becker, 1996). In methodological terms, the concept of psychic income, besides being a metaphor or analogy, reflects the tendency for public choice theory to resort to ad-hocism or ad-hockery (Barber, 1993; Conlisk, 1996), as well as "post-hoc theory development" (Green and Shapiro, 1994) when the initial optimization hypothesis is falsified. The result of this tendency to add ever-new supplementary hypotheses to somehow save the theory from empirical wreckage (for more on this, see Green and Shapiro, 1994; Miller, 1997) has been to transform the original "thick," economic model of rational public choice into a broader, "thin" model. Presumably, such a theory supplements "hard" incentives with "soft" ones, (Opp, 1989), "first-order" (self-interested) ends with "second-order" (disinterested) ends (Elster, 1989), and extrinsic (material) motives with intrinsic motivation (Frey, 1997)—i.e., money income with "psychic income." However, the outcome of this resort to post-hoc theory development, especially the "ad hoc quality of utilitarian rationalities" (Mitchell, 1978:168) as implied in a universalistic utility function, is an uneasy relationship, a tense juxtaposition of a variety of divergent human motives and purposes. For example, to the extent that such a thin public choice theory "juxtaposes Spencerian and Durkheimian sociologies, [it] minimizes, if not negates, the irreconcilability of these two approaches [as]

490

Zafirovski

'self-interest' and a 'greater moral code' are mutually exclusive depictions of human motives" (Mitchell, 1978:75). This dictum has special application to the juxtaposition of money income and "psychic income," as forms of material self-interest and "moral code," respectively. In particular, public choice theory treats psychic income and other supplementary variables as residual categories relative to money income and other "hard" incentives in political behavior, including that of officials and citizens. The moment that public choice theory, especially its "thin" variant, uses "psychic income raises the question of whether [. . .] it merely treats [it] as a residual category of motivation to be invoked when the theory otherwise gets into trouble" (Margolis, 1982:88). It is understandable that rational choice adherents who would rather stick to "thick" models (cf., Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997) than generate via ad-hoc hypotheses "thin" models complain about such "ad-hocism." For example, some of them (cf. Coleman, 1988:95-6) lament that one of the "deficiencies" of social exchange theory, as an extension of rational choice theory to sociology, is the "attempt to introduce principles in an ad hoc fashion, such as 'distributive justice' or the 'norm of reciprocity'." The satisfaction ("warm glow") derived from following such norms (Jasso and Opp, 1997) and other "soft" incentives is named "psychic income," "social profit," and the like. At best, these and similar terms, including implicit (noneconomic) "markets," are misnomers, at best they are simply metaphors. Even some economists object to the "fallacies and perversity" in such market reasoning that (mis)conceives all social, including political, life as "market experience" thereby to be subjected to some universal "market test" (Yeager, 1997:161). The above discussion has special relevance to the notion of "psychic income" in relation to genuine or money income. For psychic income simply does not add up to money income, and often vice versa, or to "utility" in any meaningful sense. For instance, it does not seem very sensible to argue that a Kantian altruist turned destitute homeless, with a zero money income but high "psychic income," is engaging in utility-optimizing behavior, anymore than is a Machiavellian egoist, "self-seeking with guile" (Williamson, 1983) high money income, but having small "psychic income" (as implied by Quigley, 1996). The former's pursuit of "psychic income" (for example, altruistic "warm glow") is detrimental to that of money income, just as is the latter's striving for money income in relation to "psychic income" (including, alongside "warm glow," leisure). As an egoist's "utility" (money income) seems of a qualitative different kind from that of the altruist's ("psychic income"), it is highly questionable to subsume under the same category—utility optimization or even satisficing—what are essentially different types of behavior, such as egoism and altruism, status and wealth,


491

political power and profit, and so on. In addition, these types of "income" are quantitatively incomparable and incommensurable, because unlike money income "psychic income" cannot be measured or quantified, unless one engages in measurements of the "same logical type as Plato's determination that a just ruler is 729 times as happy as an unjust one" (Hayek, 1955:51). In general, the same can be said of the measurement of "utility" as an overarching "objective function" of the "happiness" (or "fitness") of political rulers as well as of their "servants," including public administrators and individual citizens. This applies not only to the cardinal measurement of utility, partly abandoned in mainstream economics (except perhaps game theory), but also to the ordinal measurement, as there is no way to determine that one socio-political agent's utility or happiness is higher than that of another. Thus, the problem is not only that one cannot determined that a political agent is 729 times "happier" than someone else, but that one cannot even plausibly state that one is just "happier," i.e., has a higher "utility," than the other. There are, using economic terminology, opportunity costs, foregone alternatives, or trade-offs involved in seeking qualitative different goals in social and political behavior, for example, the more money income or material utility (self-interest), the less "psychic income" (altruistic "warm glow"), i.e., the more economic disutility. A case in point is the familiar trade-off between "hard work," including wealth acquisition or making money, and leisure as a form of "psychic income." Another is the tradeoff between the use-value (utility) or instrumentality of goods and their status-value or ceremonial aspects (Ackerman, 1997:653). This was forcefully demonstrated by Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (a general discussion on Veblen's "instrumental social science" as presented in this and other works can be found in Tilman, 1998). To say that in such cases agents maximize or even "satisfice" with respect to "utility" glosses over the complex relations between what is utility in economic terms, for instance, money income, and what is not: status, power, leisure, and other forms of "psychic income." The latter goals are in essence noneconomic deviations from, rather than emanations or realizations of, utility, profit, and other economic "maximands" (utility-maximization in consumer behavior, as well as profit-maximization in producer activities). Realization of this distinction exposes the specious reasoning involved in thinking of such values in terms of interests (as objected to the work of Becker et al. by Elster, 1998), with "psychic income" being an instance of this reasoning. Psychological, ideal, and other sociocultural phenomena are simply not what economists term income, profit, capital, and the like; they are endowed with an "autonomous structure" (Weber, 1968:341). In this sense, the term "psychic income" appears as an oxymoron, as are similar pseudo-economic

492

Zafirovski

terms, including political profit/income, political capital, political exchange, or political markets, and so on. Moreover, as psychological research reports (Rabin, 1998:16), such expressions of "psychic income" as "equity, fairness, status-seeking and other departures from self-interest [individual utility] are important in [human] behavior." On the one hand, the "thick-rational" solution, "more money," to the problem of motivation in public organizations, and generally in political behavior, has been more or less "discredited [for] more sophisticated answers (influence on public policy, power, or simply utility)" (Wintrobe, 1997:429), i.e., for a "thin-rational" alternative. On the other hand, the "thin" alternative runs into serious problems of its own, especially "pitfalls of tautology," as pointed out by some advocates of the "thick-economic" approach to politics (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962; Downs, 1957; cf., also Friedman, 1995; Miller, 1997). As critics have remarked, putting everything in an "over-arching mono-utility function" (Etzioni, 1990) makes utility a "mere mathematical trick drained of any substantive content" (Margolis, 1982:16). Thereby, public (and general rational) choice theory becomes an "empty principle" (Popper, 1967), an "unfalsifiable tautology" that "says little about human behavior [save] that it is always and everywhere rational" (Friedman, 1995: 23). For the maximization of "utility," whatever this may be and whatever it might include, is considered the epitomy of rationality, an axiom beyond any doubts (Machlup, 1963), akin to the "Church of England" preventing "any deviation into impiety" (Keynes, 1972:276-7), at least within the prevalent economic-utilitarian definition of rationality or purposeful action as a "generalized calculus of utility-maximizing behavior" (Stigler & Becker, 1977:76-7). Although they are meant to move it beyond criticism, various evolutions, variations and extensions within public choice theory can actually be used as elements of critique of the theory itself. For such attempts at extending and often changing "beyond recognition" an initially narrow "thick"/"hard" rational choice model of politics into a broader "thin"/ "soft" theory imply admitting the model's "gross inadequacies." In methodological terms, such endeavors at ad-hoc or post-hoc theory development can result in circular reasoning (as warned by Friedman, 1995; Miller, 1997), when various ad-hoc hypotheses are advanced if the initial "thick" premise of optimization fails. No wonder some authors (for example, Boland, 1981) feel compelled to address the question of whether it is futile to even criticize "thin" rational public choice theory as an "empty principle" or as an "unfalsifiable tautology." This pertains above all to the axiom of universal utility optimization, in which the "utility" function contains virtually every possible human motive and purpose; for a tautology or self-evident axiom (like mathematical propositions) cannot by definition be empirically (in)val-


493

idated (Friedman, 1995). On the other hand, some economists and rational choice theorists actually consider this tautological property of untestability a major advantage of their theory, arguing that "there is no need for direct tests of the fundamental postulates in physics or in economics—the laws of maximizing utility and profit" (Machlup, 1963:167). "Thin" rational choice theory, including its public choice type, has a tendency to mutate into a spuriously omnipotent conception of "all" political and social life in its attempt to build a "universal theoretical framework concerning rational choice and behavior" (Hodgson, 1998:168). In epistemological terms, especially on account of scope-specification and definiteness, "thin," less economistic public choice theory can be deemed even more questionable than its "thick-economic" counterpart. The latter is at least consistent and has a definite domain, albeit often unrealistic in a wide range of political, cultural, and other social situations (Frey, 1997). On the other hand, the former as a putative "cure-all" (Collins, 1986) theory is internally inconsistent and even contradictory-as everything people do is considered "rational," with indefinite/infinite scope, rendering the theory trivial or circular. By virtue of its tautological character, i.e., its "tortuous logic," which dissolves everything into utility, "thin" rational choice theory is in danger of becoming largely useless for empirical research as well as for theory building. This threat sheds light on those warnings against the "pitfalls of tautology" implied in too broad, "thin" public choice theory, especially in a fully comprehensive utility function, and against the proposed resolution to this problem by confining the theory to economic or pseudoeconomic goals (see the discussion in Miller, 1997). In the end public and rational choice theory finds itself on the open sea between the Scyllas of thick-rationality, i.e., empirical unrealism and the Charybdis of thinrationality, i.e., tautological untestability (Friedman, 1995:22-3). The first threatens to make the theory irrelevant for understanding and explaining real-life political actors and behaviors, the second threatens to destroy the theory as we know—i.e., an economic paradigm of politics—by transforming it into a circular universalistic theory. CONCLUSION In this article we have elaborated on the reasons why public choice theory is unsuitable for its self-assigned role as the general paradigm for political sociology. These reasons can be summarized as follows. First, political sociology tends to be a multiparadigmatic and thus multi-level discipline vis-a-vis public and general rational choice theory. Public choice theory is a single-cause paradigm, despite the claims (Hechter and Kana-

494

Zafirovski

zawa, 1997) for its multilevel character, with only limited and dubious validity. Second, the proper scope of public choice theory is much more restricted than that of political sociology, which views the concern with the economic components of political behavior as only a part of an attempt to analyze of the overall social setting of that behavior. Third, public choice theory is overly simplistic and reductionist, whereas political sociology is complex and polyvalent: as a result, public choice theory is often unrealistic and sometimes counterfactual when compared to political sociological analyses. Fourth, public choice theory ignores the classical tradition of political sociology in favor of utilitarianism. Public choice theory, as the economic approach to politics, also called the new political economy, amounts to a branch of orthodox economics rather than sociology, thus it is parasitic, as is the whole rational choice theory, on economic orthodoxy (Etzioni, 1991:7). By contrast, political sociology is a distinct sociological discipline, reducible neither to political science nor to economics. Public choice theory also has too strong an individualistic and atomistic bias to represent a viable sociological alternative to classical political sociology, which combines sociological holism and individualism. Moreover, in its preoccupation with the economic-financial side of political institutions, especially with government spending, public choice boils down to a monetary/public finance (Cordes, 1997; Wagner, 1997) conception that is at best a part of political sociology, including fiscal sociology. Neither is public choice theory able to account for authoritarian or totalitarian political regimes, whether they are conservative (fascist) or radical (communist), nor for nondemocratic tendencies in democracies. Political sociology is better positioned to accomplish these tasks, as indicated by the insights of its subdiscipline, the sociology of totalitarianism. In addition, public choice theory (especially Buchanan and Tullock, 1962) tends to be mostly conservative (or more rarely radical) in its ideological-political assumptions and implications, whereas political sociology strives toward ideological-political neutrality. For example, most public choice theorists, especially in the United States, regularly denounce the rise and praise the decline, in recent years of the welfare state in industrial societies as well as the use of discretionary fiscal policy, such as budget deficits as instruments of economic stabilization and expansion (Buchanan, 1991a). To that extent, they seem to share the outlook of U.S. conservative ideologues and politicians. However, it has been "a heavy irony that made the American political party seen as most sympathetic to Buchanan's philosophy—the Republicans— the carrier of the policies [deficits] that he feared would emerge from the use of fiscal policy for macroeconomic stabilization" (De Long, 1996:48). In addition, public choice advocates display a tendency to explicitly avoid citing some largely discredited concepts from economics; they yet


495

base their entire theory on these concepts. A case in point of the resort to euphemisms, especially on the part of rational choice sociologists, is the attitude toward the concept of homo economicus. Despite the tendency of most of its exponents to avoid the term, the core of public rational choice theory in economics and sociology seems to be the concept of homo economicus as a relentlessly egotistic isolate (as objected to Coleman's work by Frank, 1996:117). This appraisal is not obviated by the slight variations on the theme within "sociological rational choice theory," especially in its "thin" or rather "soft" versions. For instance, even within a presumably distinct, relative to its economic variants, rational choice theory for sociology (as claimed by Goldthorpe, 1998; Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997), the shadow (or ghost) of homo economicus looms over such notions as "rational man" (Coleman, 1986), "rational egoists" (Hechter, 1990), "utility-maximizers" (Abell, 1992), RREEM—i.e., "restricted, resourceful, expecting, evaluating, maximizing man"—(Lindenberg, 1992), and so on. Reliance on such notions within "sociological rational choice theory" (Hechter and Kanazawa, 1997) or "rational action theory for sociology" (Goldthorpe, 1998) has actually reopened the old debate on the concept of "economic man," a debate long deemed settled with the partial or complete discrediting of this concept in much of economics. The sociological and other exponents of public choice theory by postulating various versions of the concept of homo economicus, resurrect the old "phantom" and the "dead hand of the past" (Harrod, 1956). This is highly paradoxical at best, because "leading economists such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Simon and Coase, all failed to incorporate the standard picture of 'rational economic man' in their writings, or expressed profound misgivings about his behavior [while] much of [modern] sociology has now embraced rational choice (for example, James Coleman . . .)" (Hodgson, 1998:189). In this sense, it is an exaggeration to call the injection of public choice theory into political sociology, and more generally "sociological rational choice theory," an emerging paradigm (Hirsch, 1990), a nascent research program (Kiser and Hechter, 1991), or a new model. Spencerianism, for instance, was almost a prototype of rational choice or utilitarian theory in political sociology (as shown by Durkheim, Parsons, and others), as partly indicated by Spencer's counterpositioning of "man versus the state" and private versus social interests with the justification that the "society exists for the benefits of its members; not its members for the benefit of the society" (Spencer, 1969:21). Various echoes and ramifications of such statements are implied in the typical public choice dismissal of government, polity, society, and any social collectivity as "Hegelian collective entities" (Cordes 1997), "mysterious group minds" (Buchanan, 1991a), or "objective conditions" (Coleman, 1986).

496

Zafirovski

This article has not taken the claims of public choice theorists at face value. Given its assumptions of individualism, atomism, and egoism, the term public or social choice theory seems a misnomer. Alongside the euphemism associated with the concept homo economicus, public and other rational choice theorists in sociology and economics display a curious proclivity to other circumlocutions. In other instances, the primacy of individual interests is treated, via summation or aggregation in the form of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness or spurious composition, as public or social or constitutional choice (Buchanan, 1991b). The assumption of panutilitarianism and universal egoism is then called the charity principle, albeit in an epistemological sense akin to "charitable" textual interpretations (Elster, 1979; Goldthorpe, 1998). Thus the behavior of a "recklessly selfish monad" (Frank, 1997:117) engaged in a "generalized calculus" of utility-optimization behavior (Stigler and Becker, 1977), is denoted rationality or consistency. (These two concepts are typically equated in social choice theory premised on a formal definition of rationality as consistency, especially transitivity.) It should not surprise us then grounding society on such Hobbesian universal enmity or war is proposed as rational reconstruction of society. But applying the charity principle, perhaps too charitably as some economists might concede, by assuming that the model of economic man and utilitarian rationality is valid in the realm of economy or private goods, does not guarantee that the model has validity outside of this realm, as public choice theorists seem to believe. The model is particularly dubious in the domain of politics, public goods or collective action. In practical terms, the model of utilitarian public choice is self-destructive, its full application to the polity or society would be ruinous for society itself. No social choice, political or other collective action would, in fact, be possible if the basic hypothesis of public choice theory of universal egoism were true. This is perhaps the ultimate irrationality of the hypothesis and practice of utilitarian "hyper-rationality" (Elster, 1989) as the heart of public choice theory in its hard-core version. Thus, the empirical problems of public choice theory for political sociology augment the epistemological. Ones. Not surprisingly, some of its advocates try to escape this double circle, by deviating from the conventional notions of utility or profit maximization in their extension of the rational choice paradigm from markets to politics and society. For instance, public goods such as justice, security, and peace as the existential imperatives of the polity and society are, by virtue of their allocation via coercive processes and their un-marketability, differentiated from rather than equated to private, economic goods with opposite features. While allowing that the narrow public choice model can be applicable beyond the range of markets, some of its moderate exponents view it as no more than a "particular case of a more general


497

model" (Boudon, 1989:193). Consequently, they regard the theory as highly unsuitable to fulfil its self-designed mission as a "general study of social and political behavior" (Margolis, 1982:8-11), particularly because the political realm appears as a "complicated process of confrontation, conflict, dialogue and political compromise between different kinds of rationalities," rather than the realm of economic rationality, the maximization of utility, or profit alone (Martineli and Smelser, 1990:31-2). Moreover, economic rationality can be mitigated or displaced by other rationalities—especially by political and cultural (integrative), and related noneconomic processes—as the key coordinating factors of modern society, including the polity and the economy. This process counteracts to some degree the tendency of capitalist society to insulate the economic from the political and social spheres (Giddens, 1981:165). Public choice theory only posits influence from the economy to the polity and society, thereby blinding itself to determinants that move in the opposite direction. By contrast, the impact of political and social variables on the economy is the main assumption of economic sociology and/or sociological (socio) economics, including the sociology of markets (Lie, 1997). Finally, from the viewpoint of the sociology or psychology of knowledge, if no rational choice model existed, it would have to be invented, at least as a utilitarian explanation of the persistence of the model and proliferation of its practitioners, of the reasons for tenuously sticking to the concept of homo economicus which has long been buried in the past or shelved in the kindergarten of social science. As such, the economic theory of politics and society boils down to a behavioral model of its own adherents. Even some neoclassical economists like Mill and Pareto warned a long time ago that the economic model of human behavior was unable to cope with most political and other noneconomic social actions. Future historians of social science are likely to be "puzzled by the persistence with which most economists [sociologists and other social scientists] clung to such a transparently deficient model" (Frank, 1996:122), such as public choice theory, as a strident economic (mis)conception of politics.

REFERENCES Abell, Peter. 1992. "Is Rational Choice Theory a Rational Choice of Theory?" James Coleman and Thomas Fararo (eds.), Rational Choice Theory. Advocacy and Critique. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, pp. 189-203. Ackerman, Frank. 1997. "Consumed in Theory: Alternative Perspectives on the Economics of Consumption," Journal of Economic Issues, xxxi:651-64. Agodi, Maria. 1991. "Rational Fools or Foolish Rationalists?: Bringing Meaning Back in," Sociological Theory, 9:199-205.

498

Zafirovski

Aldrich, John. 1997. "When Is It Rational to Vote?" Dennis Mueller (ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 373-90. Allen, Michael. 1991. "Capitalist Response to State Intervention: Theories of the State and Political Finance in the New Deal," American Sociological Review, 56:679-89. Arrow Kenneth. 1997. "Invaluable Goods," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxv:757-65. Barber, Bernard. 1993. Constructing the Social System. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Becker, Gary. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Becker, Gary. 1996. Accounting for Tastes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Belanger, Sarah and Maurice Pinard. 1991. "Ethnic Movements and the Competition Model: Some Missing Links," American Sociological Review, 56:446-57. Boland, Lawrence. 1981. "On the Futility of Criticizing the Neoclassical Maximization Hypothesis," American Economic Review, 71:1031-36. Boudon, Raymond. 1981. The Logic of Social Action: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Boudon, Raymond. 1982. The Unintended Consequences of Social Action. New York: St. Martin's Press. Boudon, Raymond. 1989. "Subjective Rationality and the Explanation of Social Behavior," Rationality and Society, 1:173-96. Bowles, Samuel. 1998. "Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and other Economic Institutions," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxvi: 75-111. Brown, Courtney. 1987. "Voter Mobilization and Party Competition in a Volatile Electorate," American Sociological Review, 52:59-72. Buchanan, James. 1991a. Constitutional Economics. London: Basil Blackwell. Buchanan, James. 1991b. The Economics and the Ethics of Constitutional Order. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Buchanan, James, and Gordon Tullock. 1962. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clark, John Maurice. 1918. "Economics and Modern Psychology," parts I and II, Journal of Political Economy, 26:1- 30; 136-66. Coleman, James. 1986. Individual Interests and Collective Action: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, James. 1988. "Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital," American Journal of Sociology, 94:S95-120. Coleman, James. 1989. "Rationality and Society," Rationality and Society, 1:5-9. Coleman, James. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belkhap Press of Harvard University Press. Coleman, James. 1995. "Comments on Kuran and Collins," American Journal of Sociology, 100:1616-20. Collins, Randall. 1986. "Is 1980s Sociology in the Doldrums?" American Journal of Sociology, 91:1336-55. Collins, Randall. 1995. "Prediction in Macrosociology: The Case of the Soviet Union," American Journal of Sociology, 100:1552-90. Conlisk, John. 1996. "Why Bounded Rationality?" Journal of Economic Literature, xxxiv: 669-700. Cordes, Joseph. 1997. "Reconciling Normative and Positive Theories of Government," American Economic Review, 87:169-77. Dahrendorf, Ralph. 1990. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw. New York: Random House. De Long, J. Bradford. 1996. "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the Employment Act of 1946," The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10:41-53. Denzin, Norman. 1990. "Reading Rational Choice Theory," Rationality and Society, 2:172-89. Dex, Shirley. 1985. "The Use of Economists Models in Sociology," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 8:516-33.


499

DiMaggio, Paul. 1990 "Cultural Aspects of Economic Action and Organization," R. Friedland and A. F. Robertson (eds.), Beyond the Marketplace. Rethinking Economy and Society. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 113-37. Dinnelo, Natalia. 1998. "Elites and Philanthropy in Russia," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 12:109-33. Dowding, Keith. 1991. Rational Choice and Political Power. Aldershot: E. Elgar. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. NY: Harper and Row. Enelow, James. 1997. "Cycling and Majority Rule," Dennis Mueller (ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149-180. Elster, Jon. 1979. Ulysses and the Sirens. Studies in Rationality and Irrationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elster, Jon. 1989. The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elster, Jon. 1998. "Emotions and Economic Theory," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxvi: 47-74. Etzioni, Amitai. 1990. "Toward a Deontological Socioeconomics," Mark Lutz (ed), Social Economics: Retrospect and Prospect. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 221-33. Fair.Ray. 1996. "Econometrics and Presidential Elections," The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10: 89-112. Feddersen, Timothy, and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. 1996. "The Swing Voter's Curse," The American Economic Review, 86:408-24. Ferejohn, John. 1991. "Rationality and Interpretation: Parliamentary Elections in Early Stuart England," K. Monroe (Ed), The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action. New York: Harper Collins, pp. 279-305. Foran, John. 1993. "Theories of Revolution Revisited: Toward a Fourth Generation," Sociological Theory, 11:1-20. Frank, Robert. 1990. "Rethinking Rational Choice," Roger Friedland and A. F. Robertson (eds.), Beyond the Marketplace. Rethinking Economy and Society. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 53-87. Frank, Robert. 1996. "The Political Economy of Preference Falsification: Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxiv:115-23. Frey, Bruno, and Reiner Eichenberger. 1989. "Should Social Scientists Care about Choice Anomalies?" Rationality and Society, 1:101-22. Frey, Bruno. 1997. Not Just for Money. Lyme, NH: Elgar. Friedman, Jeffrey. 1995. "Introduction: Economic Approaches to Politics," Jeffrey Friedman (ed.), The Rational Choice Controversy. Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1-24. Gerrard, Bill. 1993. "Beyond the Logical Theory of Rational Choice," Bill Gerrard. (ed.), The Economics of Rationality. London: Routledge, pp. 52-71. Giddens, Anthony. 1981. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilliatt, Stephen. 1995. "Disliking Politics: Philosophical Foundations for a Sociology of the Apolitical," International Sociology, 10:283-98. Goldthorpe, John. 1998. "Rational Action Theory for Sociology," British Journal of Sociology, 49:167-92. Green, Donald, and Ian Shapiro. 1994. Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Griffin, Larry, Michael Wallace, and Beth Rubin. 1986. "Capitalist Resistance to the Organization of Labor Before the New Deal: Why? How? Success?" American Sociological Review, 51:147-67. Harrod, Roy. 1956. Towards a Dynamic Economics. London: Macmillan. Hayek, Friedrich. 1955. The Counter-Revolution of Science. Studies on the Abuse of Reason. New York: Free Press. Heckathorn, Douglas. 1991. "Extensions of the Prisoner's Dilemma Paradigm: The Altruist's Dilemma and Group Solidarity," Sociological Theory, 8:34-52.

500

Zafirovski

Hechter, Michael. 1990. "The Attainment of Solidarity in Intentional Communities." Rationality and Society, 2:142-55. Hechter, Michael. 1992. "Should Values Be Written Out of the Social Scientist's Lexicon?" Sociological Theory, 10: 214-30. Hechter, Michael. 1995. "Introduction: Reflections on Historical Prophecy in the Social Sciences," American Journal of Sociology, 100:1520-6. Hechter, Michael, and Satoshi Kanazawa. 1997. "Sociological Rational Choice Theory," The Annual Review of Sociology, 23:191-214. Hechter, Michael, Debra Friedman, and Satoshi Kanazawa. 1992. "The Attainment of Global Order in Heterogenous Societies," James Coleman and Thomas Fararo (eds.), Rational Choice Theory. Advocacy and Critique. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, pp. 79-98. Hewa, Soma. 1998. "The Protestant Personality and Higher Education: American Philanthropy beyond the 'Progressive Era'," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 12:134-63. Hicks, Alexander. 1984. "Elections, Keynes, Bureaucracy and Class: Explaining U.S. Budget Deficits, 1961-78," American Sociological Review, 49:165-82. Hirsch, Paul. 1990. "Rational Choice Models for Sociology-Pro and Con: Introduction," Rationality and Society, 2: 137-41. Hodgson, Geoffrey. 1998. "The Approach of Institutional Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxvi:166-92. Jasso, Guillermina, and Karl-Dieter Opp. 1997. "Probing the Character of Norms: A Factorial Survey Analysis of the Norms of Political Action," American Sociological Review, 62:947-64. Kahn, Joan, and William Mason. 1987. "Political Alienation, Cohort Size, and the Easterlin Hypothesis." American Sociological Review, 52:155-69. Keynes, John Maynard. 1960. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard. 1972. Essays in Persuasion. The Collected Writings, Vol. IX. London: Macmillan. Killian, Lewis. 1984. "Organization, Rationality and Spontaneity in the Civil Rights Movement," American Sociological Review, 49:770-83. Kim, Hyojong, and Peter Bearman. 1997. "The Structure and Dynamics of Movement Participation," American Sociological Review, 62:70-93. Kiser, Edgar and Michael Hechter. 1991. "The Role of General Theory in Comparativehistorical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology, 97:1-30. Klandermans, Bert. 1984. "Mobilization and Participation: Social-psychological Expansions of Resource Mobilization Theory," American Sociological Review, 49:583-600. Klandermans, Bert and Dirk Oegema. 1987. "Potentials, Networks, Motivations, and Barriers: Steps toward Participation in Social Movements," American Sociological Review, 52:519-31. Knoke, David. 1988. "Incentives in Collective Action Organizations," American Sociological Review, 53:311-29. Kuran, Timur. 1995. "The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises," American Journal of Sociology, 100:1528-49. Lehman, Edward. 1988. "The Theory of the State versus the State of Theory," American Sociological Review, 53:807-23. Lie, John. 1997. "Sociology of Markets: Heterogeneity, Power and Macrosociological Foundations," The Annual Review of Sociology, 23:341-360. Light, Donald. 1992. "Introduction: Strengthening Ties between Specialties and the Discipline," American Journal of Sociology, 97:909-17. Lindenberg, Siegwart. 1992. "The Method of Decreasing Abstraction," James Coleman and Thomas Fararo (eds.), Rational Choice Theory. Advocacy and Critique. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, pp. 3-20. Machlup, Fritz. 1963. "Are the Social Sciences Really Inferior?" Maurice Natanson (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader. New York: Random House, pp. 159-80.


501

Margolis, Howard. 1982. Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality. A Theory of Social Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martineli, Alberto and Neil Smelser. 1990. "Economic Sociology: Historical Threads and Analytical Issues," Current Sociology, 38 (2/3):l-49. Mayston, David. 1993."Public Choice, Stability and Social Rationality," Bill Gerrard. (ed.), The Economics of Rationality. London: Routledge, pp. 123-47. McAdam, Doug, and Ronnelle Paulsen. 1993. "Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism," American Journal of Sociology, 99:640-67. McGuire, Martin, and Mancur Olson. 1996. "The Economics of Autocracy and Majority Rule: The Invisible Hand and the Use of Force," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxiv:72-96. Merton, Robert. 1995. "The Thomas Theorem and the Matthew Effect," Social Forces, 74:379-422. Miller, Gary. 1997. "The Impact of Economics on Contemporary Political Science," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxv:1173-1204. Mitchell, Jack. 1978. Social Exchange, Dramaturgy and Ethnomethodology. Toward a Paradigmatic Synthesis. Oxford: Elsevier. Mueller, Dennis. 1978. Public Choice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mueller, Dennis. 1996. Constitutional Democracy. New York, Oxford University Press. Mueler, Dennis. 1997. "Public Choice In Perspective," Dennis Mueller (ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-17. Musgrave, Richard. 1997. "Reconsidering the Fiscal Role of Government," American Economic Review, 87:156-68. Olsen, Marvin. 1972. "Social Participation and Voting Turnout: A Multivariate Analysis," American Sociological Review, 37:317-33. Opp, Karl-Dieter. 1988. "Grievances and Participation in Social Movements," American Sociological Review, 53:853-64. Opp, Karl-Dieter. 1989. The Rationality of Political Protest: A Comparative Analysis of Rational Choice Theory. Boulder: Westview Press. Orema, Dirk, and Bert Klandermans. 1994. "Why Social Movement Sympathizers Don't Participate: Erosion and Nonconversion of Support," American Sociological Review, 49:703-22. Ostrom, Elinor. 1989. "Microconstitutional Change in Multiconstitutional Political Systems," Rationality and Society, 1:11-49. Pappalardo, Adriano. 1991. "The Rational Paradigm in Political Science: Persistent Anomalies and the Role of Sociology," Sociological Theory, 9:228-31. Perrone, Luca. 1984. "Positional Power, Strikes, and Wages," American Sociological Review, 49:412-26. Popper, Karl. 1967. "Rationality and the Status of the Rationality Principle," E. M. Classen (ed.), Le Fondements philosophiques des systems economiques textes de Jacques Rueff et essaies rediges en son honneur. Paris: Payot, pp. 145-50. Quigley, John. 1996. "The Homeless," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxiv:1935-41. Rabin, Matthew. 1998. "Psychology and Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, xxxvi:ll-46. Robbins, Lionnel. 1952. An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan. Rosen, Sherwin. 1997. "Austrian and Neoclassical Economics: Any Gains from Trade?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 11:139-52. Schneider, Friedrich. 1994. "Public Choice—Economic Theory of Politics," Hermann Brandstatter and Werner Guth (eds.), Essays on Economic Psychology. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 177-92. Schram Arthur, and Frans Winden. 1994. "Why People Vote: The Role of Inter-and Intragroup Interaction in the Turnout Decision," Hermann Brandstatter and Werner Guth (eds.), Essays on Economic Psychology. Berlin: Springer- Verlag, pp. 213-50. Schumpeter, Joseph. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers.

502

Zafirovski

Sen, Amartya. 1977. "Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 6:317-44. Snow, David, Burke Rochford, Steven Worden, and Robert Benford. 1986. "Frame Alignment Process, Micromobilization and Movement Participation," American Sociological Review, 51:464-81. Snyder, David. 1975. "Institutional Setting and Industrial Conflict: Comparative Analyses of France, Italy and the U.S.," American Sociological Review, 40:259-78. Somers, Margaret. 1995. "What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept of Formation," Sociological Theory, 13:113-38. Spencer, Herbert. 1969. Principles of Sociology. London: Archon Books. Stigler, George & Gary Becker. 1977. "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum," American Economic Review, 67:76-90. Sugden, Robert. 1985. "Consistent Conjectures and Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods," Journal of Political Economy, 27:117-24. Tilly, Charles. 1995. "To Explain Political Processes," American Journal of Sociology, 100:1594-1606. Tilman, Rick. 1998. "Two Recent Critics of 'Instrumental Social Science': In Defense of Veblen, Dewey et alia," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 12:81-107. Tiryakian, Edward. 1995. "Collective Effervescence, Social Change and Charisma; Durkheim, Weber and 1989," International Sociology, 10:269-79. Yeager, Leland. 1997. "Austrian Economics, Neoclassicism, and the Market Test," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1:153-66. Vira, Bhaskar. 1997. "The Political Coase Theorem: Identifying Differences between Neoclassical and Critical Institutionalism," Journal of Economic Issues, xxxxi:761-80. Wagner, Richard. 1997 "Choice, Exchange, and Public Finance," American Economic Review, 87:160-3. Williamson, Oliver. 1983 "Credible Commitments: Using Hostages to Support Exchange," American Economic Review, 74:519-40. Wallace, Michael, Larry Griffin, and Beth Rubin. 1989. "The Positional Power of American Labor, 1963-1977," American Sociological Review, 54:197-214. Walters, Pamela, and Richard Rubinson. 1984. "Educational Expansion and Economic Output in the U.S., 1890-1969: A Prodnction Function Analysis," American Sociological Review, 48:480-93. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press. Weil, Frederick. 1989. "The Sources and Structures of Legitimation in Western Democracies: A Consolidated Model Tested with Time-series Data in Six Countries since WW II." American Sociological Review, 53:682-706. Wilier, David. 1992. "The Principle of Rational Choice and the Problem of a Satisfactory Theory," James Coleman and Thomas Fararo (eds), Rational Choice Theory. Advocacy and Critique. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications, pp. 49-77. Wintrobe, Richard. 1997. "Modern Bureaucratic Theory," Dennis Mueller (ed.), Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 429-54. Wittman, Donald. 1995 The Myth of Democratic Failure. Why Political Institutions are Efficient. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.