On 17 August 2012
From: Ron Dore
Date: 2012/08/16

Gosh, I never thought I'd get into a spat ahout ratchoi, and its expansion to total tautology, but Alexander Bukh's suggestion that the only alternative is social constructivism stirs me.When I was a teenager I was much exercised by the debate about free will and determinism. Determinism wins of course. But not just social environmental determinism. Genes and the personalities developed (in society, yes, but in culturally highly differentiated families) are also important in making history. Some people are brave, individualistic, original and imaginative and others the opposite.
That's what makes for the fun of politics as opposed to the dreariness of political science.

I fully agree that (American style/positivist) political science is dreary and I am quite grateful to a number of material and mystical actors thanks to whom I am absolved from the the boring task of crunching numbers with the purpose of making some trivial arguments. At the same time, I did not intend to argue that social constructivism is the only alternative to rational choice theory. I would argue that social determinism is probably not too different from structural constructivism but there are other theories including (neo) Marxism, pos-structuralism, gender theory etc.....Social constructivism however has been seen as the main rival of rational choice. One of the main reason for this has been, I believe, due to the fact that the "thin" version of constructivism questions the universality of rationality but at the same time allows for a positivist analysis and as such is not that different from rational choice in terms of
epistemology.

Hiwatari sensei wrote,

"The way I see it, the difference between rationalist views (such as realists or neo-institutionalists) and constructivist views is in the analytical
framework: the former is an economics based positivist approach while the latter is a sociology based interpretive (or post-modern, if you wish).
(A)s such, the rivalry between rationalist and constructivist views is a choice of epistemology and not that rationalists can only explain material interest and constructivists non-material interests"

I agree that rational choice people usually use quantitative methods while constructivists usually engage in a qualitative and interpretative analysis but I have seen qualitative papers using rational choice and constructivist papers using quantitative methods. I do not think that the ontological premises of either of the theories necessarily make the usage of either of the epistimologies impossible. I always thought that the difference between constructivism and rational choice is much more fundamental and rests in their
respective definitions of rationality.

--
Dr Alexander Bukh

Graduate School of Humanities and Social Science, Tsukuba University