Dear List Members,

It has been a long time since I have engaged in these debates, and hence I do so with a certain degree of trepidation. In addition to being out of practice, I have also been traumatized by the fierce debates that continue to plague political science on this topic.
Nonetheless, once upon a time I did spend a lot of time and energy on the issue, so I feel vaguely obligated to offer some observations and hope they help illuminate as oppose to cloud the issues under discussion.

Both rational choice and constructivism come in a variety of flavors.
There is "thin" versus "thick" rational choice, and there is "thin"
versus "thick constructivism." There are many variants among them, and at a certain point the two paradigms even blend into each other. They also cut across disciplinary boundaries, although traditionally Anthropology has been very culturalist, sociology has been split between culturalism and rationalism, economics has been dominated by rationalism, and political science in recent decades has leaned strongly towards rationalism - as much for disciplinary as for analytical reasons.

According to James Fearon, Michael Hechter and others, thin rationalism is - precisely as Professor Hiwatari points out - simply the assumption that actors will seek to methodically pursue their goals, whatever those goals may be. Max Weber called this "ends-means rationality" by which he meant that 1) an actor has a goal, 2) he or she then considers the means that they have available to them to pursue those goals, 3) if the means to pursue the goal are lacking, the actor either finds a way to acquire those means, or they change their goals.

It is very easy to explain Noda's behavior using a thin rationalist approach. He may have goals that entail sacrificing his own and his party's interests - such as securing what he believes to be Japan's economic and military future. Alternatively, he may have failed to anticipate the costs of his actions. In either case, Noda's actions are hardly irrational. He would only be acting irrationally if because his individual psychological make-up causes him to ignore the costs of his actions (erroneous decision making due to what psychologists call "value complexity") or because he is operating under cultural-ideological pressures that have the same effect. Thin rational choice theorists tend to discount such psychological and cultural factors, arguing that most actors - especially in modern settings - are unlikely to succumb to such pressures.

Rationalism becomes "thicker" when various other assumptions about decision making are made. These include the assumption that actors maximize their utility (thus implying that - again as Professor Hiwatari notes - that utility is something that can be measured), that they value some goals over others (to use more technical language, that they rank-order their preferences), that decision making is made from the point of view of maximizing the utility of the individual (the assumption of "methodological
individualism") and ultimately, that all people who find themselves in similar situations will behave in a similar fashion. In other words, workers seek to maximize their income, companies seek to maximize their profits, voters the economic benefits they can expect under one government as opposed to another, parties and politicians to gain office, and so on.

Thick versions of rationalism allow for the construction of complex and sophisticated models that can yield insight on various social phenomena (see for example some of the interesting game theory"). They also hold out hope for finding the "holy grail" of social science - arriving generalizable statements about various social phenomena, such as when wars occur, when societies become democratic, the causes of the business cycle, etc. Unfortunately, such thick rationalist models tend to also become more and more abstruse and - in my view - removed from empirical reality. If I wanted to be really snide, I would add that thick versions of rationalism in political science allows its practitioners to ape Economics (what Gabriel Almond once called the "cargo cult" of rationalism - if we act like economics we will get the respect and larger salaries that economists are assumed to enjoy) and it creates significant barriers to entry and insulates the discipline from outside scrutiny, since only the rat-choice cognescenti can make sense of the immensely complex, mathematical models that they create.

Noda's behavior is very difficult - but not impossible
- to reconcile with thick versions of rationalism. As Ed Lincoln pointed out in his original post, Noda appears to be committing electoral suicide and guaranteeing his own removal from office. One could come up with rationalist explanations - that Noda believes that his political career ultimately will be enhanced by following his own convictions, or alternatively that he is really a conservative, not a DPJ, politician who seeks to reconstitute a right of center main stream party even though the DPJ will be destroyed in the process. Such explanations, however, are rather ad hoc in character and ultimately violate the spirit of the larger thick-rationalism enterprise.

I am tempted to say something about Constructivism and Culturalist explanations in general, but I realize that I have prattled on too long. I will just note that thin Constructivism and thin Rationalism are quite compatible with one another. Constructivists accept that people behave rationally much of the time, but argue that their goals and perceptions are powerfully influenced by norms, beliefs and values of the groups to which they belong. The economist Herbert Simon called this "bounded rationality."

Hope this helps.

Thomas Berger