Recent postings from Steve Reed and T.J. Pempel point remind us that not
everyone is rational, whether a lion fighting for survival or a consumer faced
with an economic decision, or an LDP member faced with policy decision.

The real power of rational choice theory in my experience has never been in
predicting/explaining INDIVIDUAL behaviour (now that's tough psychology), but in
predicting/explaining how GROUPS perform in the aggregate.

Whatever the quirks of individuals in an organization, the overall organization
will have tendencies to rational choice. Even in the lion example, individual
lions free ride, but as rat choice would predict, the organization, the pride,
remains defended.

The same holds true for the LDP member or the run of the mill voter. We don't
know how any individual will come down on a particular issue, but rat choice
goes a long way in showing us what the overall LDP will stand for based on the
rational tendencies of their overall constituencies.

Even given rat choices limitations in explaining individual behaviour, keep in
mind that individual political leaders are chosen by the group based on their
expected behaviour. This is why rat choice is still powerful in explaining why a
committee chair acts a certain way in Congress, etc.

Anyway, I hope these comments help to show rat choice in a new light to some of
the stronger doubters. Perhaps the theory should be called "rational tendency
theory" rather than "rational choice theory."

-Robert Schultz