Abstract
This article takes issue with Steiner's polemic against the usage of ‘deliberation’ in rational choice scholarship. I show (i) that the reproach that rationalists do not allow for preference change is mistaken; (ii) that Steiner does not sufficiently distinguish between normative and positive contributions and (iii) that he shields his preferred model against systematic comparisons with strategic models of deliberation. In my view, we need more competing model evaluations rather than misleading attacks against imagined heretics.
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Notes
The title of this article draws on the seminal article by Stigler and Becker (1977). I would like to thank Michael Bechtel and Jürg Steiner for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
The rediscovery of the CJT is largely due to Duncan Black. See Grofman and Feld (1988), Young (1988) and Lada (1992).
Condorcet was also a politician, architect of the ‘Girondain constitution’ and friend of Thomas Jefferson and other US politicians. McLean and Hewitt (1994) discuss Condorcet's (1785 [1972]) contributions to the social choice literature in more detail.
The problem of whether or not individuals change their preferences endogenously or not is closely linked to the consistency criterion that rational choice modellers impose on their actors – the transitivity condition according to which the preference orders of individuals remain the same when they face equivalent decision-making problems. The only exception to this sensible rationality criterion I know of is mirrored in the erratic behaviour of former Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber who had in 2005 major difficulties in figuring out whether he should go to Berlin as a ‘super minister’, hang on in Munich as ‘father’ of ‘his’ Land or retire to his provincial residence in Wolfratshausen. To the amusement of the wider audience and to the distress of his supporters, the changing preferences of Stoiber revealed severe forms of intransitivity. It should be added sadly that his more or less enforced retirement has made it much harder to explain the basics of (non)rational behaviour in a German classroom through illustrative examples.
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Schneider, G. De Deliberatibus Disputandum est: A Response to Jürg Steiner. Eur Polit Sci 7, 199–206 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210189
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210189