political science and public choice: 1950-70

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Political Science and Public Choice: 1950-70 Author(s): William C. Mitchell Source: Public Choice, Vol. 98, No. 3/4 (Jan., 1999), pp. 237-249 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30024485 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 11:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.44 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:45:54 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Political Science and Public Choice: 1950-70

Political Science and Public Choice: 1950-70Author(s): William C. MitchellSource: Public Choice, Vol. 98, No. 3/4 (Jan., 1999), pp. 237-249Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30024485 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 11:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Public Choice.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.44 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 11:45:54 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Political Science and Public Choice: 1950-70

Public Choice 98: 237-249, 1999. 237 @ 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Political science and public choice: 1950-70

WILLIAM C. MITCHELL Department of Political Science, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-0000, U.S.A.

Accepted 31 December 1996

Abstract. The early contributors to Public Choice did not find a sympathetic reception among political scientists. During the years 1950-70, political scientists were either indifferent to or hostile to the emerging field of rational choice in which the approach and tools of economics are applied to politics. In the essay that follows I attempt to explain this situation and why another revolution - the behavioral - dominated political science for more than twenty years. Despite the prominence of rational choice in some political science journals, that dominance continues, a matter I hope to address in a subsequent article.

1. Introduction

In the pages that follow I describe the condition of political science during the period of 1950-70 and explain why the nascent rational choice approach was mostly ignored while the behavioral movement was so successful in its agenda setting. The behavioral approach to politics may be briefly charac- terized as the application of the tenets and methods of social psychology to power relationships. Although the behavioralists prevailed there was a strong research tradition that could have sown the seeds of rational choice but, in fact, did not, and worse, actually opposed the work of Duncan Black, Kenneth Arrow, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

When Arrow (1951), Black (1948), and Buchanan (1949, 1954) were pub- lishing their path-breaking analyses during the late 1940s and early 1950s, political scientists were producing historical descriptions of formal political institutions that were not in the least based on or guided by explicit economic reasoning. Traditional political scientists were not shocked by these striking analytic forays of economists into their discipline; rather, they were largely unaware of an incipient cross-disciplinary challenge.

2. Nascent rational choice

Early social and public choice presented not only a revolutionary method- ological challenge, but a substantive one as well. Arrow and Black and ear-

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lier, Bowen (1943) all raised questions, both normative and empirical, about the aggregation of individual votes into collective outcomes, questions that were not focal points of political science. Among economists, determining whether simple majority rule could produce equilibrium outcomes was a pre-occupation and, as is well-known, the early Arrow-influenced work led to quite pessimistic conclusions. However, many political scientists accept- ed the more optimistic possibilities envisaged by Black and Downs. Of the early theorists, only Downs and Olson made a profound impact on politi- cal science. Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent (1962) won more attention among political scientists than Arrow and Black, but much of it was a vociferous rejection even though the authors offered a strong posi- tive endorsement of the possibilities of democracy. What annoyed political scientists were the counter-arguments about alleged market failures, and the Tullock demonstration that simple majority rule is not unique and can lead to excessive government spending. Unfortunately, political scientists never did and still do not appreciate their defense of log-rolling and the explanation of rent-seeking among interest groups. Clearly, The Calculus of Consent has never achieved the status among political scientists that it has among public choice analysts.1

While, Downs' first book was mostly rejected on methodological grounds, several of his theorems including the rational ignorance of voters, median voter outcomes, suboptimal public supplies and, in more general terms, his positive attitude toward the workings of democracy gained more favor than the Arrow-based literature. Less successful was Downs' simple model of voting outcomes based on a single dimensional view of issue spaces. A more

complex, realistic, multi-dimensional model of those spaces also generated Arrow cycles. Conventional political science of the 1950-70 period did not conceive of voting and elections in the abstract terms originated by Arrow, Bowen, Black, and Downs; they created a revolution!

Among the founding fathers of rational choice, only Downs and Olson were accorded serious attention by ordinary political scientists. Olson's work on the logic of collective action and its application to interest groups drew immediate attention because the subject-matter was easily understood, if the economic reasoning on public goods was less so. His counter-intuitive argu- ments on group size and under-supplied public goods took time to accept while his pessimism about altruism alienated some political scientists and

,perhaps, angered a few. It is useful to remember that early public choice was read against the background of the unpopular Vietnam War and a widespread acceptance of idealistic politics of the Left. The only well-known political scientist among the founders of rational choice was William H. Riker. His initial contribution was the application of game theory to the formation of

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coalitions. The model he presented - zero-sum games under certainty - was an analogue of the economist's perfectly competitive market and, therefore, unlikely to persuade political scientists on either methodological or norma- tive grounds. The chief conclusion of Riker was logically impeccable, i.e., coalitions under his restrictions would be of a minimal winning size. "Down- to-earth" political scientists had no model to counter Riker, but they had a lot of "common-sense" which showed that most politics is not zero-sum and that Downs was right on coalition size and Riker wrong.

In retrospect, the work of the early writers could hardly have been expect- ed to win many converts among political scientists. There was an obvious negative quality to the major findings. Individual values and collective out- comes could not be easily reconciled. Stable equilibrium could be expected only under a very narrow set of conditions. Civic book voters were not to be found while small but powerful interest groups prevailed. The supply of public goods was either too much or too little. And, so a highly abstract litany of political failure was the hallmark of the nascent rational choice paradigm and movement.

3. Political science in the 1950s

At the same time, however, political science did provide a potentially favor- able response to rational choice, one based on an honorable research tradition that might be loosely described as "political economy." Several well-known political scientists, including Robert A. Dahl and his economist colleague Charles Lindblom (1953), David B. Truman (1951), V.O. Key, Jr. (1947), E.E. Schattschneider (1935), A.F. Bentley (1908), E. Pendleton Herring (1929), G.E.G. Catlin (1927, 1930), Earl Latham (1952), and others were all impressed by the role economic interests played in politics and democ- racy, in particular. In today's lexicon, they were interested in voters and pressure groups engaged in "rent-seeking" and, in a less coherent way, the imperfections and failures of a democratic political-economy. Since all val- ued pluralism, i.e. a diverse group structure of society they worried about the market power of private monopolies and especially the undue influence of business interests in the political process.

Although impressed by the power of self-interest and, to a lesser extent, rationality, none of these scholars could even vaguely imagine how the tools of economics might be employed in the study of politics. G.E.G. Catlin (1927, 1930) was the sole exception, but his abstract, but voluble work was never to exercise any influence over subsequent political science. In short, political science was unprepared, by training as well as by its past, to embrace formal economic analysis of either the economy or polity. One of my mentors, V.O.

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Key, Jr. (1966), clearly viewed voters as both self-interested and rational ("Voters are not fools"), but he never accepted Anthony Downs deductive theory (1957) as a productive means for studying politics. He felt quite strongly that deductive analysis added little or nothing to political science and was, in fact, "overkill," i.e., the marginal costs exceeded the marginal benefits. At the same time, he was also skeptical of the rapidly unfolding behavioral revolution because the reduction of politics to social-psychological categories and determinants "took the politics out of the study of politics."

The works of E.E. Schattschneider, in particular, are quite revealing with regard to the relationship between economics and politics. His name is recog- nizable to many public choice analysts because of his pioneering work on rent-seeking, namely, Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (1935), a work much cited by public choice economists dealing with international trade, protec- tionism, and the like. Less well-known is a later work, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (1960), a work that is less

systematically empirical than Politics, Pressures and the Tariff but analyti- cally richer and closer to some aspects of public choice. Without the benefit of game theory, Schattschneider (1960) was able to conceptualize U.S. pol- itics in much the way William H. Riker (1962) was to do two years later. Schattschneider dealt in an imaginative way with the "contagion of conflict," "the scope and bias of the pressure system," "the displacement of conflict," and what we now term the "agenda problem." Like Key, Schattschneider was highly skeptical of economic theory, but that did not prevent him from doing some remarkable economic analysis, albeit of an informal kind.

In 1951, the year in which Arrow's monograph was published, David B. Tru- man made a significant and lasting addition to the interest group approach with The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (1951). This singularly influential study not only fleshed out the pluralist view but fueled the behavioral revolution then in its infancy. Although Truman thought he was extending Bentley's classic analysis, he was, in fact, advancing the behavioral revolution through his extended and detailed use not of economics, but of sociology, anthropology, and social psychology. Aside from this social science orientation, Truman did much to inventory and systematize countless case studies of interest groups and, perhaps more important, to formulate some impressive implications about rent-seeking and its consequences.

Truman examined the origins of interests and interest groups (mostly neg- ative externalities), their internal structure, problems of cohesion and leader-

ship, tactics of influence, and the role of groups in a representative democracy. He concluded that cohesion was the single most important problem facing an interest group and had a major impact on its rent-seeking successes. All of this analysis is, of course, most relevant to the public good problem and

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free-riding. Unfortunately, as Mancur Olson (1965) was to point out, Truman had no clear notion of public goods. Still, most of his analysis holds despite Olson's strictures. What may be more important is Truman's contention that although rent-seeking (like Olson, he never used the term) was pervasive and potentially pathological, it was basically positive. He perceived many of the difficulties caused by the phenomenon but, in the end thought it mostly benign, a conclusion later shared by Gary Becker (1983) and Donald Wittman (1995), whose approaches are rigorously economic and not socio-psychological.

Robert Dahl, certainly one of America's premier political scientists, espe- cially during the behavioral revolution, was notably different from Key and Schattschneider in that he was more self-consciously analytical and wrote in an elegant manner designed for the ages. Although his many books and papers are all relevant to the period we are covering and, indeed, even for public choice more generally, I restrict my comments to Politics, Economics, and Welfare (1953) and A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956). The former volume, co-authored by Charles Lindblom, broke much new ground but has never attained the status one might expect for a pioneering attempt at unifying economics and political science. In retrospect, the authors failed because they made an effort to integrate existing scholarship rather than present strikingly innovative theorems as did Arrow, Black, Downs, and Buchanan and Tullock, who largely ignored the past and set forth totally new perspectives. This is not to say that Dahl and Lindblom were without a particular analytical thrust, for they had one - one much more favorably disposed to politics and govern- ment than, say, Van den Doel and Van Velthoven later but parallel work in Democracy and Welfare Economics (1993).

The authors set out to explore the question: What are the conditions under which numerous individuals can maximize the attainment of their private goals through the use of social mechanisms? After some one hundred or more pages of preliminaries regarding rationality and social control, they examined four central sociopolitical processes (price system, hierarchy, polyarchy, and bargaining). The final section of the book consists of a more practical attempt to assess these processes in terms of their suitability for "economizing," i.e., their efficiency potential. Special attention is paid the price system.

Overall, we can admire the authors' fairmindness; they did, in fact, examine the strengths and weaknesses of the various sociopolitical processes. Existing scholarship and the preceding thirty years of real world experience under- standably inclined Dahl and Lindblom to assess markets and politics as they did. I might note that many years later, in a talk with Dahl, I suggested a second edition, a recommendation he immediately rejected because, as he replied, it would become a totally new book. He did "not feel up to the task." Too much scholarship would have to be read and assessed. I certainly agree. And, much

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of this scholarship would be from public choice, a field that in 1953 barely existed. A new book might have been an attack on public choice generally and the Virginian version, in particular. Much later, Lindblom wrote a sequel, Politics and Markets (1977), that ignored public choice while asserting a basically hostile view of the field.

Three years were to pass before Dahl was to publish his better-known vol- ume, A Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), a further step toward recogni- tion of public choice. Published a year before Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy, the book cites both Arrow and Black somewhat favorably. Although the book has attained the status of a minor classic in political sci- ence, it remains largely unknown and unheeded by economists interested in

public choice. Among its attractive features are an elegant style and, more important, its clarity and rigor; Dahl actually employed elementary, formal arguments in his effort to construct a viable theory of how democracy func- tions. Instead of building a Downsian-type analysis, Dahl chose to examine three extant informal theories, which he labeled "Madisonian," "Populistic," and "Polyarchal" democracy. In a final chapter he assessed U. S. democracy, the "American Hybrid." The closest thing to his book is Riker's Liberalism Against Populism (1982), a much longer and more formally rigorously argued statement based on the accumulated thinking now known as social choice.

Though Riker's reference is brief, he was generous in his citation of Dahl, as well he should have been.

Dahl was greatly interested in both aggregation and intensity problems - in fact, so much so that his discussion of them might be regarded as the core of the book. But if voting dilemmas are so pervasive, perhaps elections and voting are not the core of democracy. Dahl (1956: 146) expressed his reservations in the now oft-quoted "The making of governmental decisions is not a majestic march of great majorities united upon certain matters of basic

policy. It is the steady appeasement of relatively small groups.". Thus, Dahl

recognized, after Key, Truman, Riker and Schattschneider, that rent-seeking is a major phenomenon of democracy and that elections are important for

controlling leaders but ineffectual as indicators of majority preferences. He did not, however, examine specific electoral rules.

Regardless of the role that interest groups play in a democracy, Dahl believed that Riker exaggerated the difficulties of voting cycles and that his attack on populist democracy was overdone; indeed, Dahl (1989) subse-

quently claimed that Riker's liberal democracy did not escape the difficulties of a populist democracy. Removing elective officials may be a more limited

goal for democracy, but as with Riker's argument about the meaninglessness of populist electoral outcomes so are the results of voting out of office a politi- cian and/or party. Dahl also asserted that constitutional rules are not crucial

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in the maintenance of democracy; rather, they are important only in shap- ing allocative choices. Constitutions, furthermore, are accepted not because of rational choices but for nonconstitutional or nonrational reasons such as political socialization of the citizenry. Finally, Dahl argued that constitution- al rules are effective guarantors neither of government by majorities nor of liberty from tyrannous majorities. I think it safe to say that the conventional learning in current public choice is the very opposite of each of these startling propositions. In any event, political science of the 1950s was more in accord with Dahl than with an emerging public choice model.

4. Why public choice did not take root

Although there were certain fertile conditions enabling a rational approach to politics to take root, the fact of the matter is that nothing occurred and the ground remained fallow until well into the 1960s. Those political scientists predisposed to include some economic and/or rational considerations into their models were disposed not to accept the methods offered by Arrow, Black, Buchanan, and Baumol (1952) during the 1950s. Why was this the case?

In the first place, the revolutionary way of thinking set forth by Arrow and others was, indeed, a radically unfamiliar or different way of conceptualizing politics, radical in that it was highly abstract and demanding if one was to truly understand the method. Plato was abstract, but not in a mathematical way. Furthermore, even those political scientists reviewed above were so empirical in their basic orientation that the demands of carefully reasoned deductions tried their professional patience. Dahl was a partial exception, but as we have seen, his substantive position on democracy was at odds with that of the new public choice analysts. I should also note that few political scientists, then and now, have had any intensive training in economics or mathematics. Retooling was, for most of these political scientists, out of the question; all were mature scholars with substantial intellectual investments whose opportunity costs seemed awfully high.

It is only fair to note that the incipient political economy's future was not at all clear even to its founding fathers. Was it to become a genuine new field or just a passing fad? In perusing the early classics by Arrow, Black, and Buchanan and Tullock, I can find neither an awareness on their part of having started a revolution nor an indication of some grand intellectual scheme such as envisaged by, say, Karl Marx.

Our founding fathers did not see themselves as demolishing political sci- ence and reinventing it as something totally different; rather, they seemed to have tackled some specific interesting intellectual problem in a different

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light and offered it as such, no more and no less. I have the feeling that they may all have been hugely surprised as the enterprise they set in motion bore its inevitable fruit. My suspicion is that none had even the remotest notion of or familiarity with political science. None were economic imperi- alists, certainly not in any deliberate, conscious sense. If there was to be any imperialistic mission it would not begin until well into the 1960s and after Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent (1962) and Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965). And, of course, there was the founding of the Public Choice Society in 1964 and its journal, Papers in Non-Market Decision-Making, (1966) later to be rechristened Public Choice (1968).2 If this general argument is true, we begin to understand why the behavioralists within political science were to achieve their rapid victory in restructuring the discipline, while the political economists were left largely impotent for nearly twenty years. Public choice did not become a perceived "threat" among political scientists until the 1970s.

5. The behavioralist revolution

There can be no dating of the behavioralist revolution in the precise way social choice was born, that is, with the publication of a substantive theory about a mayor problem. Behavioralism, in contrast, emerged as a set of articles and books advocating a particular cross-disciplinary approach to the study of politics (Eulau, 1963). To be sure, within a short time behavioralist- oriented scholars began applying the orientation to a vast variety of political phenomena.

Basically, behavioralism was a revolt against what some political scientists viewed as a very sterile, legalistic political science that ignored actual individ- uals behaving in political ways. Thus, like public choice, behavioralism was based on the study of individuals; but unlike public choice and economics more generally, it made intensive use of sociology and psychology both in terms of substance and methods. Instead of studying the state and its legal institutions, the behavioralist looked into personalities and how those person- alities responded to social structural conditions. The quest was to discover the "determinates" of behavior, with determinates defined as those things beyond the control of individuals. Thus, we learned a great deal about the social- economic-status backgrounds of people. And we learned much about various

personality characteristics. What we did not learn was how individuals made choices or decisions. Those two terms, incidentally, are seldom found in the indices of sociology and psychology textbooks The same can still be said of U.S. Government texts which introduce students to political science.

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Behavioralists took "science" seriously; they believed that they did some-

thing that could be called scientific work. For them the pursuit was to find the causes of behavior. The way to do this was through the use of polling procedures, statistical analyses, interviews, participant-observation, as well as many other techniques employed mostly by psychologists and sociologists. The work of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan was especially critical in the behavioral movement not only because of its famous electoral studies of presidential elections but also for the summer training programs it ran to update untrained political scientists. One was not quite a behavioralist unless one had attended one or more of these summer sessions. The intense professional solidarity among behaviorialists of the 1960s could not have been attained without these "boot camps." Unfortunately, public choice has never had an equivalent center and has relied instead upon a hand- ful of university departments in economics and political science to provide professional training and inculcation of professional group norms.

Much of the behavioral research of the late 1950s and 1960s focused on political participation; as a result, we had reams of articles, books, and textbooks on parties, interest groups, elections, and political socialization. Other research brought "realism" to the study of legislatures and judicial processes, including the Supreme Court. Some of this work, borders on a public choice treatment, and especially that pertaining to coalitions among court justices. One reason for this possible public choice perspective is that, unlike ordinary citizen-voters, justices publicly engage in rational reasoning, the results of which can be read in their opinions. In contrast, many political scientists view courts as reflecting class and economic divisions in the larger society. But these treatments resemble Marxist reasoning rather than the application of economic analysis of, say, Richard Posner (1973).

Another important and highly contentious arena for behavioral research, especially in the 1960s, was the debate regarding community power struc- tures. Dahl (1961), Floyd Hunter (1953), and Robert Agger Goldrich, and Swanson (1964) produced studies of particular communities having quite different power structures. Dahl's study of New Haven found considerable pluralism whereas Hunter, who studied Atlanta, saw a distinct "power elite," as did C. Wright Mills (1956) generalizing for the entire nation. Agger and his associates examined several small towns in Oregon and discovered, hardly to their surprise, that there were "the rulers and the ruled." Although much of the debate over the incidence of power focused on research techniques the basic difference was really ideological; each side in the pluralism debate found what it wanted to find. Those who "discovered" little pluralism did so because they saw a very skewed distribution of politically relevant economic resources; those who detected dispersed or pluralistic power patterns empha-

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sized changing resource bases and the fact that no policy outcome was stable. The pluralists also recognized the importance of the constitutional framework, something the power-elitists did not. Both schools dealt with the economic resources underlying power, but neither employed economic reasoning about the use of those resources.

The behavioral revolution was a revolution in both methods and substance, but the substance was lacking a major ingredient, namely, a view of the political system that would both guide research and aid in explaining how everything held together. The typical behavioralist thought only about discrete correlations, not about where they came from or what they might mean collectively in a larger analytical setting. So, inventories of "propositions" were compiled as though somehow our understanding would be advanced and deepened as a result of reading all these disparate but "interesting" statistical relationships.

Thus, the work of David Easton, especially in The Political System (1953), came to play a role that is difficult to overestimate. Easton set forth a cri- tique of existing political science castigating the dominant traditions of arid institutionalism and histories of political thought. In their place, he set forth a conceptual framework for research and theory building that would focus not on the state, or power, but on the political system. Empirical research on behavior would than have some presumed logic and meaning. Behavioralists soon began footnoting the book as the analytic setting of their endeavors. Much of this citation was little more than pro-forma, scholarly decoration and held little real theoretical significance. In any event, Easton became the chief "theoretician" of the behavioral movement.

The Political System treated or conceptualized politics as a study of the authoritative allocation of scarce values, that is, as a system of inputs (support and demands) and outputs (decisions and actions) with a feedback mechanism. Oddly, Easton firmly rejected the basic notion of equilibrium as an essential component of the system. This idea from economics, he contended, was

premature. He felt that whatever the variables in a political system, few were

quantifiable as in economics. In fact, Easton never warmed up to the use of economic or deductive reasoning in the study of politics. He did not have a clear notion of how the field could build a deductive analysis. Instead, he seems to have preferred a political science that would make use of his categories in setting out areas of inquiry. Easton himself did notable empirical work in

political socialization (1969), but he was never to build deductive theory in the way economists have in demonstrating the logical coherence of a market system. As the behavioral revolution was routinized and accepted, so, too, was Easton to "disappear" during the 1970s. Despite the superficial appeal that

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systems analysis might have held for an incipient rational choice approach, few references were made to Easton (see Riker and Ordeshook 1973).

6. Why the behavioralists prevailed

Whereas the public choice movement consisted mostly of economists, the behavioral revolutionists were genuine revolutionists - political scientists attempting to change their own discipline. That they did so utilizing the borrowed research tools of other disciplines was less important than their professional identity as political scientists. Then, too, these political scientists were not unknowns; in fact, the major participants were all very well-known and respected professionals whose views had to be considered. This is not to say that the guardians of the old did not resist, for, in fact, they did, and some of them were also high-status members of the profession, including Hans Morgenthau, Karl Friedrich, Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and V.O. Key, Jr., certainly a distinguished lot. As to be expected, the battle over behavioralism was fought in the journals, at the annual conferences, and within many departments.

Led by very able middle-aged professionals, the behavioral movement was attractive to many young political scientists because it promised exciting new opportunities, ideas, research tools. and contacts with members of allied fields in psychology and sociology. It also held the allure of gaining research competence in the use of statistics and other arcane tools. We must not underestimate the status gained by demonstrated competence in the use of new technical tools. The revealed preferences among economists for mathematical exposition is an even more dramatic case. To become proficient in basic quantitative methods required some effort and thereby increased the perceived value and cost of these methods. Still, the demands of statistical competence were hardly the equal of competence in economics and mathematics During the behavioral revolution a rational young political scientist could make a small investment in tools and gain considerable prestige, whereas those who opted for joining the rational revolution would have to make a considerably greater investment but not have the certainty of higher payoffs. Thus, we find that most of the young converts to rational choice were those who had already acquired considerable capital in mathematics and/or economics. They found an additional use for already acquired capital investments. Their numbers were few and would not increase much until the 1970s. Even today, most political science departments offer little, if anything, to equip their graduate students for work in public choice (see Dow and Munger, 1990). Disturbing as it may be, the vast majority of contemporary political scientists remain largely ignorant of both economics and mathematics. That is why they rejected

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Peter Aranson's introductory textAmerican Government: Strategy and Choice (1981) as well as the premature Political Analysis and Public Policy (1969) by Joyce M. and William C. Mitchell. Both volumes made use of the evolving work in public choice, and in Aranson's case, extensive use of elementary game and decision theory. Neither set of tools has made a discernible impact on current texts.

In any event, behavioralism is now so imbedded in political science that the word is unknown amongst the younger generation; it is simply political science. Older political scientists may dimly remember the old battles and lament the current prevalence of rational choice models in the American Political Science Review, but rational choice is still not in command of the

profession.3 Its adherents are mostly among the second generation trained by Riker and some of his talented students. Now at the height of their careers

they are a distinct minority who, interestingly enough, have their own disputes within rational choice, the sharpest of which relate to economics and the Virginian school. These disputes, deserving as they are of further study, are beyond the scope of this essay.

Notes

1. See, William C. Mitchell (1987) for an Assessment of the Impact The calculus of consent has had in political science.

2. The only political scientists in attendance at the first meeting of what was to become the Public Choice Society were William H. Riker, Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, and Gerald Kramer. My name could be added at the second meeting. Joyce M. Mitchell attended the 1968 session as did two graduate students from Princeton - Norman Frohlich and Joe A. Oppenheimer.

3. The first rational choice articles to appear in the American Political Science Review were published in 1962. By 1972, the percentage of rational choice articles in that journal had risen to about eighteen from the previous five percent in 1962. See, Donald P. Greene and Ian Shapiro (1994), pp. 2-5.

References

Agger, R., Goldrich, D. and Swanson, B. (1964). The rulers and the ruled. Cambridge, MA: Wiley.

Arrow, K. (1951). Social choice and individual values. New York: Wiley. Aronson, P. (1981). American government. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers. Baumol, W. (1952). Welfare economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Becker, G. (1983). A theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence.

Quarterly Journal of Economics 98: 371-400. Bentley, A. (1968). The process of government. Evanston: Principia Press of Illinois. Black, D. (1958). The theory of committees and elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University

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