Creating a Paradox: Self-Interest, Civic Duty, and the Evolution of the Theory of the Rational Voter in the Formative Era of Public Choice Analysis

Abstract

The rational choice or “economic” approach to politics—public choice analysis—brought the self-interest axiom into the analysis of the political sector as part of a move to provide a model of political behavior useful for economic policy analysis and bring a greater degree of theoretical rigor to the analysis of the political process. One aspect of this line of inquiry involved the portrayal of voting as a utility-maximizing choice. The problem that immediately arose, though, was that the model implied that rational individuals will not vote, which flies in the face of empirical data on voter turnout. One of the oddities of the application of the rational actor model to politics is that it seemed to offer rather convincing explanations for many forms of legislative and bureaucratic behavior but could not explain this most basic of democratic political decisions. Rather than see this as evidence against the rational choice model, public choice scholars—political scientists as well as economists—attempted to rescue the rational choice model through various means. This article examines the early evolution of the theory of the rational voter, including the attempts by public choice scholars to reconcile the predictions of the model with empirical realities. It shows how, in the process, these scholars absorbed within the rational actor model some of the very motivational forces that the rational choice voting model was originally intended to replace.

Keywords

• rational voter
• public choice
• economics imperialism
• rationality
• self-interest
• political science