Word: rationales
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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"Rational choice leaves out what makes politics interesting: passions," Hoffmann says.
"The trouble with rational choice," the New Republic writes, "is that it is dominating the profession and displacing...other methodologies."
Rational choice, which grew out of the study of economics in the 1970s, works under the assumption that people only act in ways that benefit them. Rational choice scholars collect large pools of data and attempt to write mathematical models that will predict how government works.
But rational choice proponent Kenneth Shepsle, who recently ended his term as chair of Harvard's department, says his methodology is attacked simply because it is straightforward in stating its assumptions about human motivation so strongly.
Traditionalists admit that rational choice has a place in political science, noting that it has worked well in some predictions about how American government works.