Bounded Rationality and Elections

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality. One may speak of grand campaign strategy, rationally formulated and executed with precision, but a great deal of campaign management rests on the hunches that guide day-today decisions. The lore of politics includes rules of thumb that are supposed to embody the wisdom of political experience as guides to action. An intellectual revolution has occurred in political science: the diffusion of rational choice theories. The study of elections has been one of the most receptive subfields. All of its major components— party competition (Downs 1957), turnout (e.g., Riker and Ordeshook 1968), and voters' choices (Downs's spatial-proximity theory; see Merrill and Grofman 1999)—have been strongly influenced by ra­ tional choice models. We think this has been a salutary development for both the disci­ pline in general and the study of elections in particular. The rational choice program has given political science a much-needed degree of intellectual coherence. This new-found coherence connects sub-fields both by causal claims—we can now more easily see the con­ nections between foreign and domestic politics via, e.g., models of interest groups on trade policy (Grossman and Helpmann 1994)— and by giving us ideas that unify previously disconnected subfields— e.g., problems of credible commitment in governmental borrowing (North and Weingast 1989) and in fights over succession (Powell 2004). Rational choice theories have generated some predictions that have stood up rather well to empirical tests: delegation to con­ gressional committees (Krehbiel 1991), macroeconomic effects of partisan elections (Alesina and Rosenthal 1995), bureaucratic inde­ pendence (Huber and Shipan 2002), fiscal effects of constitutions (Persson and Tabellini 2003), and cabinet formation and stability