Hi all,

I will jump into this one on rational choice versus culture.

Rational choice analysis assumes that preferences and utilities of individuals come from somewhere (exogenous to and prior to the rational choice model) and that cultural values make an important contribution to people's utility functions. Rational choice assumes that people know what they want (this is not actually true all of the time), and that when they know what they want they pursue their preferences rather than run away from them (this seems pretty likely to most of us, right?). Rational choice makes NO assumptions about the content of people's preferences or about the universality of certain preferences -- everyone in these models is entitled to their own. The assumptions we play with in a particular model are guesses, and rational choice theorists know that. The guesses may be wrong, and we can go back and start with different guesses if we need to.
If we start out with a model of what we think people want, and cannot predict their behavior, rational choice analysis HELPS us because the failed predictions indicate that our initial assumptions were wrong (about the utilities preferred by the actors or about the actual options available or about the real payoffs that the individual actors see as consequences of those options) and send us back to the drawing board. This situation -- when people seem to choose what they do not want, or avoid what they really want -- leads us to discover institutional and cultural constraints, leads us to discover the complexities of certain choices, leads us to pay attention to the difference between the value of a payoff and the likelihood of really getting it (Bayesian strategies), and makes us appreciatae the importance of collective choice (other people may screw up my ability to get what I want because they make confounding choices).** Finally, rational choice analysis only works for fairly simple and stark choices -- it falls apart when actors are torn between conflicting preferences, and face enormous difficulty deciding which they prefer.

**This has been an incredibly valuable insight. The study of political behavior used to conclude that if people did not fight for democracy, or did not vote, or did not engage in political action, they were content without it. This conclusion was not informed by rational choice analysis:
it was a very simple finding based on superficial observations that assumed behavior is a fair reflection of preferences, and many people took it as a discovery about culture: people who do not fight for democracy do not value it; people who have already fought for it and won do not need to continue to fight for it because they have it. Since then we have had to turn these views upside down. We finally know that people can DESPERATELY want something (a) that they can't get on their own without numerous others making the same choice (collective action problem), and (b) for which they see very low odds of success and very horrible consequences along the way.
So for decades we all thought Arabs didn't want democracy because they did diddly squat to get it. Now we know that "institutional constraints" can include monstrous dictators who have armies of hit men and a vast network of underground jails for dissenters, and this can silence a population that really wants democracy for forty years. what did it take for us to realize our conclusions were absolutely wrong? Arabs making different choices about their behavior, making it impossible to imagine any longer that they did not want democracy.

Meg McKean
Duke University