William Riker Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

William H. Riker (1920–1993) was an influential twentieth century American political theorist who developed methods for applying mathematical reasoning to the study of politics. After receiving his PhD from Harvard, Riker began his teaching career at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, right in the middle of the mid-century behavioral revolution in political science. He took a less-traveled path and sought something different from the statistical truths and behavioral reality that were popular in the day—something more fundamental and foundational.

Riker did not, as did his behavior list contemporaries, think of individuals in political life as bundles of demographic characteristics, sociological connections, or psychological predispositions, but rather as goal-oriented, purposeful actors. Individuals, for him, were rational; they had an innate capacity to assess alternatives in terms of preferences, to organize their beliefs about the likelihood of various events occurring, and to combine preference and belief in a logical manner. If preferences are represented by a utility function, and beliefs by subjective probabilities, then rationality entails maximizing behavior— choosing the alternative with the highest expected utility. For Riker, the rationality hypothesis provided the firm foundation on which to understand human behavior in general. To understand political behavior in particular, his instinct was to imbed rational individuals in institutional settings—in committees, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies, parties, electoral situations, even revolutionary groups. He called the study of politics from this perspective positive political theory (to distinguish it from normative political theory).Through his teaching and writing, he created a new school of thought that, half a century later, remained part of the mainstream of political science and one of the essential building blocks of modern political economy.

Of the nearly one hundred papers he wrote, the two most often cited are “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting” (Riker and Ordeshook 1968) and “Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions” (1980). He is perhaps best known, however, for four books: The Theory of Political Coalitions (1962), Federalism: Origin, Operation, Maintenance (1964), Introduction to Positive Political Theory (1972), and Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (1982). The first characterizes all that we think of as political as consisting of the forming of coalitions, where rational individuals engage in this activity in order to win. The volume on federalism, significant when it first appeared, had a renaissance at the end of the twentieth century when, with the fall of communism, federal experiments in nation-building accelerated. Introduction to Positive Political Theory was essentially the very first textbook of political theory, transforming important parts of political science from civics and wisdom to science. Liberalism against Populism demonstrated how an axiomatized logic of political choice could shed light on many of the philosophical issues at the foundation of democratic theory. Together, this corpus became the exemplar for how to do political science.

Riker’s crowning achievement was to institutionalize rational choice approaches to politics into a political science curriculum at the University of Rochester in New York. He came to Rochester in 1962 as its chair and created a PhD program in political science shortly thereafter. By the time of his death three decades later, Rochester had produced more than one hundred PhDs and had become a brand name.

Bibliography:

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and Kenneth Shepsle. “William Harrison Riker, 1920–1993.” In Biographical Memoirs. Vol. 79.Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001.
Riker,William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962.
Federalism: Origin, Operation, Maintenance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964.
Introduction to Positive Political Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972.
“Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions.” American Political Science Review 74 (1980): 432–446.
Liberalism against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice. San Francisco: Freeman, 1982.
Riker,William H., and Peter C. Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 25–42.

This example William Riker Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.