Theory,Stylized Heuristic or Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration

Rational choice is intimately associated with positivism and naturalism, its appeal to scholars of public administration lying in its ability to offer a predictive science of politics that is parsimonious in its analytical assumptions, rigorous in its deductive reasoning and overarching in its apparent applicability. In this paper I re-examine the ontology and epistemology which underpins this distinctive approach to public administration, challenging the necessity of the generally unquestioned association between rational choice and both positivism and naturalism. Rational choice, I contend, can only defend its claim to offer a predictive science of politics on the basis of an ingenious, paradoxical, and seldom acknowledged structuralism and a series of analytical assumptions incapable of capturing the complexity and contingency of political systems. I argue that analytical parsimony, though itself a condition of naturalism, is in fact incompatible with the deduction of genuinely explanatory/causal inferences. This suggests that the status of rational choice as an explanatory/predictive theory needs to be reassessed. Yet this is no reason to reject rational choice out of hand. For, deployed not as a theory in its own right, but as a heuristic analytical strategy for exploring hypothetical scenarios, it is a potent and powerful resource in post-positivist public administration.     

Strategies for Managing Rogue States

In the ongoing debates on how to manage relations with rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, the opposing policies of both hawks and doves are unrealistic in their pure forms. Throughout American history, presidents have faced the same choices the Bush administration now has when dealing with adversaries abroad: appeasement, engagement, containment, rollback, and non-entanglement. Each of these five basic strategic alternatives has potential advantages and risks. In analyzing how these have applied to U.S. relations with Iraq, North Korea, and Iran—the so-called axis of evil—it becomes clear that rollback and appeasement are the riskiest options and containment the most promising. Elements of diplomacy, however, can be used in conjunction with a primary policy of containment to head off threats from rogue states.     

Does Competition Law Influence REACH Consortia?

The new European Union Regulation for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals which came into force in June 2007 requires companies to work together on information relating to substances in their products in order to share data and the cost of generating new data, in order to minimise animal testing and reduce the financial burden associated with testing costs. Registrants of the same substance will be allocated to Substance Information Exchange Fora and may even form their own consortia, all with their own potential Competition Law aspects.     

Community Capacity Building: A Critical Evaluation of the Third Sector Approach

Throughout the advanced economies, public policy has become ever more deeply involved in developing the capacities of communities to help themselves. Until now, this has been pursued through facilitating the development of community-based groups. The aim of this paper, however, is to critically evaluate the implications and legitimacy of this public policy approach that views developing community-based groups and community capacity building as synonymous. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the United Kingdom, it is here revealed that this third sector approach of developing community-based groups privileges a culture of community involvement that relatively few engage in and is more characteristic of affluent populations, while disregarding informal acts of one-to-one engagement that are both a more popular form of community involvement and also more characteristic of the participatory culture of less affluent populations. The paper concludes by exploring how public policy might respond, especially with regard to the finding that less affluent populations have relatively informal cultures of engagement.