Positive Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Positive political theory is the study of politics based on the assumption that goal-oriented individuals behave rationally. A rational individual ranks the alternative actions available, taking into account personal preferences and beliefs about the possible outcomes associated with those actions. The rational individual then chooses the action that ranks highest. Positive theory is a political theory because it is explicit about its fundamental assumptions concerning political behavior and because it formally derives the implications of those assumptions using the theorem-proof method used in mathematics. It is positive because it attempts to explain and predict what happens when individuals find themselves in political settings, rather than assess these outcomes in terms of what is good or right.

Origins Of Positive Political Theory

If William H. Riker is the father of positive political theory, then Anthony Downs may be considered its godfather. Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) made the rational choice assumption the foundation of a theory of democratic elections. Although his book contained virtually no economics, presumably he labeled his approach an economic theory because, by that time, the rationality assumption had become so completely identified with that discipline. Riker was responsible for wresting that assumption away. His use of the qualifier positive, in turn, reflected the extent to which political theory had become so closely identified with normative evaluation. In particular, Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions (1962) exploited results from game theory, which had been developed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, to predict the characteristics of coalitions that would form in legislatures and in international settings. For example, he demonstrated the conditions under which legislative coalitions would contain just enough members to pass the legislation their members desired.

In The Calculus of Consent (1962), James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock revisited a central question of modern political philosophy by investigating why rational individuals would create coercive political institutions like legislatures in the first place. They reinvigorated a very old analytic device, the thought experiment imagining individuals in a so-called state of nature, and recharged it with a more explicit and careful use of the rationality assumption. In studying the design of institutions, Buchanan and Tullock showed that democratic political goals were not as clear-cut as many had thought. Thus, they argued that the principle of majority rule did not deserve its special status in political theory. Rather, it was only one of many voting rules individuals would fashion to achieve their complex and competing goals.

Individuals may want political institutions, but in The Logic of Collective Action (1965), Mancur Olson recognized the difficulty of mobilizing the collective energies of individuals even when they share a common goal. Thus, positive theory brought into question the sociologist’s typical assumption that common goals automatically produce united action. This so-called collective action problem continues to be an area of extensive research.

By the 1970s, under Riker’s original intellectual and then institutional leadership at the University of Rochester, positive theory became the foundation of a broad and increasingly influential research program. One important strand of this program focused on the spatial theory of voting associated with Downs. Positive political theorists investigated modifications and the limitations of Downs’s median voter theorem, the prediction that in two-candidate single-issue elections, candidates will converge to the median voters’ ideal position so long as all voters participate, their utility declines monotonically away from their unique ideal position, and candidates are only concerned with winning. Modifications included the reconsideration of candidate motivations, possible abstention by voters, and, perhaps most important, election campaigns involving platforms that cannot be described in terms of a single dimension. In the latter case, initial theoretical results suggested the likelihood that there will be no equilibrium, which threatened to empty spatial theory of some of its empirical content. More recent work has discovered empirically plausible ways to restrict the range of likely outcomes.

Another important strand of research examined the legislative process within governments. In this context, voters directly consider policies rather than the candidates representing them, so the typical problem that votes do not automatically translate into policies does not directly arise. However, the potential instabilities involved in voting remain. Addressing this concern, researchers have found that institutional structure plays a significant mediating role between legislators’ preferences and policy outcomes. When legislative committees are given different jurisdictions over policies, for example, more stable or different policy outcomes can emerge than would prevail in an institution-free setting. Similarly, the sequence in which policies are decided can have an important impact on what is decided. Even potential instability in voting outcomes can have specific empirical consequences insofar as it opens the door to agenda setting by legislative leaders.

Practical Uses

Increasingly, the positive theory of elections and legislation has been integrated into comparative politics, turning to multicandidate elections, proportional representation schemes, and coalition building in parliamentary democracies. Positive theory’s attention has also expanded beyond democracies. Dictatorships and oligarchies have proved to be a fertile area of research, including the determination of why some societies become democratic and others do not, and why some are stable and others are not. Positive theory has also played a major role in international relations, the study of interactions among governments. Positive theorists have shown how different environments can lead the same rational leaders to war or peace.

In its relatively brief history, positive theory has had an extraordinary impact on political science. It also has generated, and continues to generate, substantial intellectual opposition. Questions have been raised about the use of mathematical methods to study human behavior, the restrictive nature of its deductive techniques, and its empirical adequacy. In truth, positive theory has not definitively resolved even the basic problem of explaining turnout in mass elections. Perhaps most contentious of all is the theory’s underlying idea that individuals behave rationally. As these debates unfold, it is important to recognize that the rationality assumption is deeply embedded in the way scholars think about individuals. Absent this fundamental assumption, political science would somehow have to discover a way to ascribe to an individual specific preferences and beliefs that were not rationally connected to the very behavior providing the evidence for those inferences.

Bibliography:

Austen-Smith, David, and Jeffrey S. Banks. Positive Political Theory I: Collective Preferences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.
Downs, Anthony. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row, 1957.
Olson, Mancur. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.

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