Analyzing Politics Rationality Behavior And Institutions

[Hetty Calin]

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Bounded rationality conceives of people engaging in politics as goal oriented but endowed with cognitive and emotional architectures that limit their abilities to pursue those goals rationally. Political institutions provide the critical link between micro- and macro-processes in political decision-making. They act to (a) compensate for those bounds on rationality; (b) make possible cooperative arrangements not possible under the assumptions of full or comprehensive rationality; and (c) fall prey to the same cognitive and emotional limits or canals that individual humans do. The cognitive limitations that hamper individuals are not only replicated at the organizational level but are in fact causal.

Political scientists studying institutions have harnessed two distinct approaches in studying the relationships between individuals and institutions. One is based in the rational choice framework most generally associated with economics. Rational actors deploy the most efficient means to achieving their goals. Politics is centered on strategic action deployed in pursuit of goals; as a consequence, goal-oriented behavior must be a large component of any decision-making approach in political science. The approach has a long history in the discipline (e.g., Riker, 1962). In the study of legislatures, rational models of maximizing actors subject to the constraints of rules have proved fruitful.

Yet large swaths of behavior in institutions remain unexplained within the rational-choice framework, and in many cases the models have failed to provide predictive successes. Simon (1985) argues that these models never will be able to because they postulate knowledge of goals of actors as auxiliary assumptions, which cannot be known with any certainty without empirical inquiry. Moreover, all political actors have multiple goals, and the specific trade-offs may not be understood even by the actors themselves.

How do these differences contribute to decision making in politics? As of the early 21st century, we lack a coherent bridge between the micro and macro levels of information processing that is representative of individual decision making. And from a larger level, such a bridge should include organizations, social processes, and other macrophenomena such as public policy processes and economic considerations. New developments in political science, behavioral economics, cognitive studies, and psychology are opening new possibilities of unifying the decision-making processes of the individual, a primary focus of the behavioral sciences, and the operation of social collectives, the domain of social science (Jones, 2017). The shortcomings of comprehensive rationality, commonly known as rational choice, can be addressed by a more robust understanding of choice through the lenses of behavioral rationality.

In this article, we argue that a shift toward the use of a bounded rationality framework will provide scholars with more realistic models of political decision making without sacrificing the strategic component of human behavior. Bounded or behavioral rationality does not imply non-rational behavior. By integrating institutions as the link between micro and macro processes, scholars can better understand interactions among elites as well as the causal nature of their cognitive underpinnings as they relate to organizational outcomes. In making our argument, we explore the evolution of bounded rationality from its beginnings in public administration to being a regularly utilized model for decision making in the public policy process literature and political science more generally (displacing, in some cases, the model of comprehensive rationality).

Comprehensive rationality makes sweeping assumptions about cognitive abilities and the decision-making processes of humans in general. Also known as rational choice theory, comprehensive rationality has served as a durable model for a framework on individual decision making, in that the theory conceptualizes individuals as rational, calculating, and strategic. Individuals are seen as decision-making actors who can weigh alternatives and trade off seamlessly among competing goals (represented in economics as indifference curves) before making a decision. These are Herculean assumptions, as empirical studies in choice have shown. The approach does not require the use of all information, but it does require that information be acquired until the likely value of the next bit of information is less than the cost of acquisition. This ought to be recognized as almost as Herculean as a full-information assumption, fundamentally impossible in an uncertain world.

Decision makers decide among alternatives under several theoretical assumptions within the framework of comprehensive rationality. First, the list of alternatives is to be exhaustive; second, alternatives must be directly comparable; and last, alternatives must be transitive (i.e., a preference of a to b and b to c implies a strict preference of a to c) (Jones & McGee, 2018; Jones, McGee, & Shannon, 2018). From here, rational individuals make decisions that maximize their benefits and best match their preferences (Jones, 2017). In this view, people are able to routinely check in with, update, and affirm their preconceived preferences, which are relatively stable. In terms of making political decisions, the motivation for comprehensive rationality is chiefly to understand why individuals vote for candidates who may or may not represent these preconceived preferences.

As cognitive psychology developed, it became clear that a model of the environment alone could not explain human choices. Rather, the internal processing of information from the environment was critical (Simon, 1985). Put another way, psychologists began to integrate the way people think (i.e., information processing) into their broader models for understanding stimulus-response patterns.1 Bounded rationality developed independently from cognitive psychology, but both were strongly influenced by Herbert Simon, and his mastery of cognitive psychology literature certainly helped in developing his model of bounded rationality (Jones, 1999; Simon, 1985).

But organizations do not fully compensate for human decisional frailties. Organizations are not so separate from decision-making behavior of individuals because it is individuals who compose institutions themselves. Institutions are created, operated, and sustained by individuals for better or worse, so they are also characterized by the bounded rationality of those individual actors.

Behavioral organization theory, developed initially by Herbert Simon and James March (March & Simon, 1958; Simon, 1947), emphasized the ability of organizations to expand the capacity of human actors. Human limitations are expanded through specialization of function and coordination through hierarchy. In addition, organizations compensate for human attentional limits through providing parallel processing of diverse informational inputs. Organizations assist in distilling the overabundance of information in the external environment, as individuals rely on serial processing of information for particularly difficult problems (prioritizing a single issue at the expense of others). Formal rules and informal norms govern the day-to-day behaviors of organizational members and subparts, necessitating the need for top-down intervention only occasionally.

Institutional arrangements can offset this key limitation by allowing a legislature, for example, to process several streams of information at once via a committee system. This same hierarchical arrangement allows both task specialization (commonly noted, e.g., members on a congressional committee specializing in a policy area) and canalization of finite attention (not often appreciated). This setup still requires legislative leaders to prioritize what committee recommendations are considered by the chamber floor, but it vastly simplifies the task. Of course, leaders are bounded themselves and are not immune to selective attention, emotional involvement, and an inability to compare complex sets of alternatives systematically. For example, institutions such as committees are likely to privilege certain types of information over time, engage in constrained patterns of information search, and have similar agendas (Breunig & Koski, 2009). This limitation causes organizations to mimic human limitations in making decisions.

Students of bounded rationality in the policy process distinguish between the problem space and the solution space, a distinction that harks back to classic studies of problem solving by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1972). Rational choices must be based not only on choosing the optimal solution, but also on modeling the problem space correctly, something almost always ignored by rational choice theorists in political science. Newell and Simon found that the subjects of their problem-solving experiments failed to analyze the problem space, barreling ahead and forging a solution. They found that decision makers use heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, in trying to understand the problem space and design solutions to it. A common approach was trial and error; only after multiple failures did decision makers turn to rethinking the problem space.

Students of bounded rationality might identify these trends of party importance as being driven by whether members of Congress are identifying with their role as a member of the legislative branch first or their role as a party member first. With this thinking in mind, the Founding Fathers were right to fear the formation of political parties because they can clearly shift how members views their role and therefore which goals they pursues with their power. If, for example, there is an ethics violation by a member of Congress, and the committee handling these violations is chaired by a member who identifies with her role as a member of Congress first, we expect that committee to gather information about this ethical conundrum. If this chairman identified with her party first, it seems less clear that she would pursue punishment for this ethics violation. Put another way, adopting a boundedly rational point of view can alter our theoretical expectations for outcomes from political decision making. Later in this article, we explore these differences further and attempt to understand how choosing one theoretical foundation over the other impacts what predictions we make about the political world.

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