Chapter 2 Reading Notes.docx - GOV 1050 Chapter 2 Reading...

GOV 1050 Chapter 2 Reading Notes
· If people are rational and self-interested it becomes possible to explain and even predict
their actions in ways that would allow rational choice theorists to claim for themselves a mantle
of scientific credibility.
· If you know that someone wants X and believes Y then, if people can be relied upon to
effectively further their goals, it becomes possible to predict that they will act in way Z.
· Rational choice theorists were not the first to employ the assumptions of rationality and
self-interest.
· A ‘realist’ tradition within international relations, tracing its origins back to ancient Greece
and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, suggests that states’ actions are explicable in
terms of a self-interested drive for power and that their leaders’ commitments to justice,
peaceful co-existence and international norms of behavior are ‘cheap talk’.
· Mueller went so far as to predict that ‘rational choice and political science will be