Politicians are motivated primarily by the desire to avoid blame for unpopular actions rather than by seeking to claim credit for popular ones. This results from voters' ‘negativity bias’: their tendency to be more sensitive to real or potential losses than they are to gains. Incentives to avoid blame lead politicians to adopt a distinctive set of political strategies, including agenda limitation, scapegoating, ‘passing the buck’ and defection (‘jumping on the bandwagon’) that are different than those they would follow if they were primarily interested in pursuing good policy or maximizing credit-claiming opportunities. These strategies in turn lead to important policy effects, including a surrender of discretion even when it offers important credit-claiming opportunities.

The Politics of Blame Avoidance

This article compares two theories of human rationality that have found application in political science: procedural, bounded rationality from contemporary cognitive psychology, and global, substantive rationality from economics. Using examples drawn from the recent literature of political science, it examines the relative roles played by the rationality principle and by auxiliary assumptions (e.g., assumptions about the content of actors' goals) in explaining human behavior in political contexts, and concludes that the model predictions rest primarily on the auxiliary assumptions rather than deriving from the rationality principle.The analysis implies that the principle of rationality, unless accompanied by extensive empirical research to identify the correct auxiliary assumptions, has little power to make valid predictions about political phenomena.

Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science

This paper tests hypotheses concerning the effects of economic factors on public opinion toward immigration policy Using the 1992 and 1994 National Election Study surveys, probit models are employed to test diverse conceptualizations of the effects of economic adversity and anxiety on opposition to immigration The results indicate that personal economic circumstances play little role in opinion formation, but beliefs about the state of the national economy, anxiety over taxes, and generalized feelings about Hispanics and Asians, the major immigrant groups, are significant determinants of restrictionist sentiment. This restricted role of economic motives rooted in one's personal circumstances held true across ethnic groups, among residents in communities with different numbers of foreign-born, and in both 1992 and 1994.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2998640.pdf

Public Opinion Toward Immigration Reform: The Role of Economic Motivations

The task I shall undertake here is to compare and contrast the concepts of rationality that are prevalent in psychology and economics, respectively. Economics has almost uniformly treated human behavior as rational. Psychology, on the other hand, has always been concerned with both the irrational and the rational aspects of behavior. In this paper, irrationality will be mentioned only obliquely; my concern is with rationality. Economics sometimes uses the term "irrationality" rather broadly (e.g., Becker 1962) and the term "rationality" correspondingly narrowly, so as to exclude from the domain of the rational many phenomena that psychology would include in it. For my purposes of comparison, I will have to use the broader conception of psychology. One point should be set immediately outside dispute. Everyone agrees that people have reasons for what they do. They have motivations, and they use reason (well or badly) to respond to these motivations and reach their goals. Even much, or most, of the behavior that is called abnormal involves the exercise of thought and reason. Freud was most insistent that there is method in madness, that neuroses and psychoses were patients' solutions-not very satisfactory solutions in the long run-for the problems that troubled them. The assumption that actors maximize subjective expected utility (economic rationality) supplies only a small part of the premises in economic reasoning, and that often not the essential part. The remainder of the premises are auxiliary empirical assumptions about actors' utilities, beliefs, expectations, and the like. Making these assumptions correctly requires an empirically founded theory of choice that specifies what information decision makers use and how they actually process it. This behavioral empirical base is largely lacking in contemporary economic analysis, and supplying it is essential for enhancing the explanatory and predictive power of economics.

Rationality in Psychology and Economics

Publisher Summary The purpose of this chapter is to examine the empirical evidence on the role of self-interest in forming and maintaining sociopolitical attitudes. Psychoanalytic theory highlighted the persisting effects of early experience and the influence of unconscious motives. Behaviorism focused especially on mindless conditioning and on the resistance to change of ingrained habits even in quite changed circumstances. The Conflict theory highlighted the unusual power of fear and irrationalities such as displaced aggression. The Gestalt theories emphasized perceptual biases introduced by the human's effort to achieve a coherent perceptual organization of the world. Priming an accessible construct has been demonstrated in several ways to give an impact over other attitudes, judgments, and behavior. Self-interest has had quite a specific meaning, focusing on the conjunction of egoism, materialism, and rationality. The chapter examined attitudes toward racial policies and black candidates, economic policy issues, pocketbook voting, and attitudes toward political violence. Self-interest ordinarily does not have much effect upon the ordinary citizen's sociopolitical attitudes.

The Role of Self-Interest in Social and Political Attitudes

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voter's calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the public's evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.

Economic Voting and the “Symbolic Politics” Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis

Political business cycle models propose an attractive rationale for presidents to manipulate the economy: it is a way to win votes. But there is little empirical support for the hypothesis. The problem with positing that vote maximization leads to political business cycles is clear: the incentive is universal; the facilitating economic and political conditions occur frequently; but the outcome occurs seldom. Why is it that only some presidents respond to the incentive only some of the time? What features of an administration might help us explain or predict the occurrence of such cycles? The issues here are not limited to economic policy-making: they raise questions about goal-setting and policy coordination. Focusing on economic policy helps to structure observations within an important but bounded context. This paper focuses on two critical aspects of economic policy-making: the president's economic ideology summarizes the administration's goals; the organization of economic advice provides a means thro...

The Interplay of Ideology and Advice in Economic Policy-Making: The Case of Political Business Cycles

Economic interdependence complicates domestic policymaking by interposing the decisions of foreigners in the loop that links policy instrument settings to economic outcomes. Nowhere was this vulnerability to external decisions demonstrated more forcefully—even for the world's major economies—than by the energy supply shocks of 1973 and 1979. The oil shocks posed challenges that offer unusual insight into the way nations choose policies: their severity forced a policy response; their unpredictable timing and (at least in 1973) unprecedented nature ruled out conventional formulas and brought to the fore explicit policy trade-offs. This article seeks to explain how policymakers in the world's two major economies responded to these external shocks. The analysis successively employs three vantage points—system, society, and state—in tracing the sources of domestic adjustment policies. It focuses specifically on the extent to which policies accommodated or extinguished each shock's inflationary impulses and on the coherence and consistency with which the executive in each government formulated and pursued particular policy goals. A comparison of these four cases illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of increasingly detailed theoretical frameworks for explaining policy choice. Although the research does not contradict the depiction of the United States and Japan in terms of state strength, it does underscore the importance of looking beyond formal institutional arrangements to consider how elite policy preferences, ambitions, and capacities can define the way constraints influence policy.

M. Stephen Weatherford

Papers

Economic Voting and the “Symbolic Politics” Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis

The Interplay of Ideology and Advice in Economic Policy-Making: The Case of Political Business Cycles

Domestic adjustment to international shocks in Japan and the United States