Ellis Krauss wrote:

>How many people on SSJ would have said that Koizumi
was not being rational....
>If Noda's ... actions wound up being popular with the public and
>reviving the fortunes of the DPJ, how many of us would say that he was
>not being a rational actor in retrospect?
>

RK:

Historian Barbara Tuchman makes an important distinction in her book "March of Folly." In a world of uncerainties, simple miscalculation is going to happen a certain percentage of the time and therefore calculated risks by decision-makers are unavoidable.
There is a world of
difference between that and what she calls, "folly,"
i.e. a refusal to
heed the available evidence due to assorted blinders and excessive wishful thinking.

In the case of Koizumi, I would say he took a calculated risk to fight for his policy goal. He had not fought, he would have been neutered, so he had little to lose. He would rather have gone down fighting than accept being neutered. Beyond that, years of precedent had shown that, when he engaged in "Koizumi theater," couching policy debates as a morality play between the good guys and the bad guys ("forces of resistance"), it boosted his approval ratings. So, his "Hail May pass"
of a snap election, expelling postal rebels, appointing assassins, and turning the postal issue into a grand referendum on the whole notion of reform was a calcuated risk by someone quite attuned to public feeling.
What is strange about Koizumi is that, having won in a landslide, he did not use his newfound power to push harder for his policy goals. E.g. in the effort to pass the postal bill, he had let it be watered down. He could have restored the original bill. He chose not to.

In the case of Noda, by contrast, one either has to assume complete folly if his goal was self-interested power-seeking, or else one has to judge that passing the tax was more important to him than either his own power or that of his party. How many people on this list believed in January that prioritizing the tax hike would help Noda and the DPJ? How many still believed that in April or May?

(How many who thought that the tax hike
was a good idea in substance also thought it would help the DPJ politically? How many who thought the tax hike was a bad idea in substance thought it would harm the DPJ politically?)

>From what I can tell, the whole school of "public
choice" theory a la
James Buchanan rests of the notion that political actors--whether politicians or bureaucrats--do not act in order to promote the public good but to aggrandize their own position. To me, it would seem that Noda's actions must be taken as either an exception to this standpoint, or as evidence that the standpoint is, at best, incomplete.

However, I truly did expect rational choice proponents to provide some sort of explanation that made sense within their model.
Meg McKean's
answer, "If one gets a lot of utility out of pursing principle, then a rational actor will do so" strikes me as tautological, i.e. he did it because he wanted to do it. What we want to know is:
under what
conditions do politicans who face constant trade-offs among several goals--including both personal ambition and policy goals and social passions--choose one goal or the other. Under what conditions does the ranking of goals change?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a lot of interest among rational choice proponents on the list in trying come up with an explanation. Psychologists have shown that it is typical for everyone, including social scientists, to weigh more heavily evidence that confirms their paradigms than evidence that undermines it; they often ignore the latter. And PET scans back up this finding and help explain why it exists.

BTW, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing the impact on economics of certain findings from psychology, has pointed out that the rational choice model is incomplete even in explaining how people act to achieve a given goal, what Tom Berger referred to as "thin" rationality. His findings--which show how people deviate even from pure instrumental rationality in predictable ways-- gave rise to the growing school of thought known as "behavioral economics."
He has a chapter on this issue, e.g. the "Allais paradox"
in his recent book "Thinking Fast and Slow," and he has the brain scans to back up his psychological experiments. Even the economists, political scientists, etc. in the audience to which he presented this finding violated their own premises, e.g. "expected utility theory," when he had them perform an experiment. When he and his colleague showed the rational actor proponents that they did so, they basically either ignored the contradiction or presented what Kahneman considered the equivalent of Ptolemaic epicycles.

EK:

>Another political science problem we
>share with several other social sciences : we are extremely poor at
>prediction but better at post-facto explanation.
>

RK:

I agree and take it further than Ellis. Economists not
only have trouble
predicting the future; sometimes, they can't even
predict the past. This
is especially true when intepretations of the past have
ramifications
for policy. e.g. the cause the 1930s Depression or the
apparently purely
factual issue of whether or not there was a major
growth in income
inequality in the US over the past couple decades.
Worse yet,
politically liberal economists and politically
conservative economists
come down on different sides of what are seemingly
technical issues. I
wonder if there is any literature on how political
outlook correlates
with model preference among political scientists.

Richard Katz
The Oriental Economist Report