Hi everyone -

I've enjoyed these exchanges. I'm sort of in the middle between David Slater and Meg McKean, in that, like Professor Slater, I don't think anyone ever makes a choice outside of a cultural framework, but I agree with Professor McKean about the ideal flexibility of rational choice theory in considering the origins of preferences.

Aside from the larger issues of whether most rational choice accounts do in fact pay careful attention to preferences that can't be meaningfully inferred from formal institutions -- like market rules or electoral systems -- I'd like to raise at least a couple of questions about an illustration that Professor McKean uses to make one of her valuable points.
>
> 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.

I'm not sure I would count myself as one of the we who thought Arabs didn't want democracy -- or as one of the we who now think that "they"
do. Indeed, I think that one of the points in cultural analysis -- and this is the way I myself would use "culture," not as a thing but rather as shorthand for an interpretive approach or epistemology -- is that we have to pay careful attention to the construction of categories and the ascription of intentionality.

I don't think, for example, that all of the careful and widely read English-language scholarship on the Middle East has assumed that there's a kind of collective Arab will or predisposition toward something or another.
Countless scholars on the middle east over the past few decades have challenged the idea that there's a singular Arab perspective or position that defines behavior. Some of the best and most widely-read works on politics in Arab countries in the past couple of decades -- e.g., Lisa Wedeen's "Ambiguities of Domination,"
Marc Lynch's "Voices of the New Arab Public," Tamir Moustafa's "The Struggle for Constitutional Power" -- have instead taken it as axiomatic that specific institutions of coercion have had profound consequences for the strategic activities and identity construction of citizens themselves, with different effects in different places.
Certainly, the absence of democratic revolutions can't be taken as the absence of interest in democracy.

But I think that they'd be just as loath to take the Arab Spring as evidence that "Arabs want democracy," at least as an expression of overall collective will. The uprisings may lead to democracy or may not, but I think the assumption of many who study and write about the Middle East would be that the uprisings are, like most such social revolutions, complex combinations of social and political action directed at a number of goals, democratization being one of them but sitting alongside greater representation of religious, business, ethnic, or other interests, including in ways that wouldn't necessarily meet a textbook definition of democracy.

Indeed, I think that for many of us who think of ourselves as working with culture or approaching things using interpretive perspectives, part of the question would be about the cultural framing of "Arabs" as a group with a collective interest, as well as "democracy" as a clear goal and object of action/desire/etc. I would in fact raise the same set of concerns about the United States; put frankly, I'm not always sure how great the "American" commitment to "democracy" is, given the myriad ways in which American democracy is itself understood and Americans are defined, so that efforts to pull names from voter lists and the use of "harsh interrogation techniques" are both normalized by many who are as "American" as I as being essential to the safety and security of our freedoms and liberties. I know most Americans, if polled, would say they support democracy, but I'm not sure the system most would describe would correspond to a version that might appear in the APSR. The interesting thing is that so many things that I myself might not define as democratic would be taken so easily and unproblematically by others as being exactly that.
And that strikes me as being a cultural phenomenon, the construction of meanings by different actors (me, other
Americans) in ways that allow us to attach value and legitimacy to certain goals and actions through their framing. It certainly does, as Professor McKean suggests, mean that simple explanations of political behavior have to be dropped, but I think they also militate toward caution in the framing of questions and problems.

This, I think, gets us back to the discomfort raised by the Kurokawa comment. I don't really have a dog in the race over whether the Fukushima disaster can be ascribed to "Japanese culture" -- though it wouldn't be the first place I'd look, and actually not in my top thirty options -- but rather about the occasional framing of a certain set of practices as "Japanese" or not. Deference to authority, unwillingess to challenge others -- basically, all that stuff describes me on a bad day. Or a good one. I've no doubt that were I working at the Fukushima plant on March 11th or for TEPCO in the years leading up to it, things would have gone equally badly. So I'm less interested in Mr.
Kurokawa's comment that this came out of Japanese culture, as that's not what the report seems to indicate (admittedly, I've read less than a third of the Japanese report so far), than in the fact that that particular explanation was available to him as something that might be shared with foreign readers.
It's that reliable availability of "Japanese culture"
as a thing, the monster up on the hillside ready to come down and terrorize the townspeople (to paraphrase Mos Def), that's pretty interesting to me, as well as the fact that the easily available counter-arguments reflect not some sort of inherent risk in nuclear power but rather the individual mistakes (human error) or institutional configurations that mess up our ability to manage that risk.

Best wishes,

Dave