fatvegan

I've been reading about reading about rational actors or some such today. Apparently there's a paradigm or a model for political analysis called "The Rational Actor Model" which has gone out of fashion recently. People seem to prefer "The Bureaucratic Dynamic Model" and "The Political Process Model". I can't remember what their proper names are, but that's the jist of them.

So people are saying that the rational actor model doesn't work because not all decisions are made by individuals, or by entities with a unified agenda. That's true, but it doesn't mean that assuming rational actors is a bad idea. The rational actor model seems to be an abstracted superset of the other two. The other two talk about "process outcomes" and "political resultants" as the "units of analysis". Which is fair enough. But they aren't operating on the same level. The rational actor model, I think, is assuming that those outcomes and resultants (whatever that means) will tend to be rational in general. Which seems quite a reasonable assumption, especially in the case of big, effective institutions like governments. Governments tend to last for a long time and would be replaced by an alternative if they didn't come up with good (which I guess tend to also be rational) decisions.

So the rational actor dooby isn't saying that bureaucratic processes and political fandangling don't play a part. All it's saying is that those models tend to result in outcomes that are safely abstracted to a simpler analysis of choices made by a unified entity. It might be interesting to go down deeper, and analyse the causal components, but it generally won't be necessary.

But who knows. These folk are way smarter than me. I'm probably just not understanding. And they use lots of big words that I don't understand. So far I don't understand "entente", "detente", "recidivist", "hermeneutic" and "phenotypical". And I've only just started. But then one of the things I enjoy most about university is how stupid it makes you feel.

This one I'm reading now talks about anyone who isn't an academic researcher as a "lay actor". The media, government and voters. How condescending is that!