Rational choice theory came to the other social sciences, especially political science and, more belatedly sociology, from economics, in the second half of the 20th century. The essence of the approach is very simple. It maintains that the primary explanation for an action is that the actor calculated said action to be the most efficient way of acquiring a desired goal. Obvious as this must seem to anyone from outside the social sciences or philosophy, it is in fact neither obvious, simple, or even necessarily often true. Rational choice theory is the best, indeed usually the only, approach available to economists, but it is controversial as to whether or not our economic behaviour is typical of our more general social behaviour. When buying or selling it is a rare person who deliberately acts other than to maximize a relatively measurable utility. (Though even in economics phenomena like brand loyalty or ‘retail-therapy’ can decidedly blur the edges of rational strategic calculation.)
Voting behaviour was the first area to which political scientists applied rational choice theory, because it is relatively easy to see the act of voting as akin to making a purchase. The voter trades in his vote by giving it to the party whose political programme he thinks will most likely benefit him. Even here there are alternative theories, the most common being that voters have a psychological tie to a party like that of a sports fan to a football team, and voting is no more rational than automatically supporting Manchester City FC because one was born in Manchester. Equally a protest vote, given to a party of which one does not particularly approve in order to signal disaffection with the one that might be the ‘rational’ choice, is problematic.
The problem then is that almost any action can be shown to be rational, if one sufficiently widens the meaning of the rational connection. Thus, a protest vote is rational if one aims to send a signal; voting for a party because one identifies with it psychologically, is rational if propping up one’s self-image is a target that can be realized through rational achievement. The economists’ use of rationality works because they can readily dispense with ideas like altruism or mood, and because they are more concerned about predicting aggregate behaviour rather than individual behaviour. Thus, even if quite a lot of people buy soap powder because the colour of the package attracts them, these individual non-rational behaviours are likely to cancel out in the aggregate, leaving a result that looks price-and-cost rational.
Much of social behaviour has not traditionally been seen as means–end related, but rather as the result of acting out values, social expectations, or sheer habit (traditional ways are preferred simply because they are traditional). Nevertheless, rational choice theory has been applied, sometimes with surprisingly successful results, even to such areas as church attendance, participation in hopeless political protest, and the lower rate of female participation in politics. The main criticism of it is more to do with how full an explanation rational choice theory can provide. It may be that given an actor’s set of values, much of what he chooses can be shown to follow a rational choice paradigm. Typically though, we want to know why he or she held the values in the first place. Again it is because there seems to be no need to explain why people prefer to buy cheaper goods that rational choice theory works in economics.
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