Cohn

1 Pages 284 Words

In Cohn’s article on rational choice, it becomes apparent that a growing sub-group within political science becomes increasingly frustrated at the unpredictable nature of the field of political science. This mathematical approach to explaining political phenomena sought to create a model by which all political issues could be explained, through quantification. The movement of rational choice evolved from the few to a growing number of people. Cohn describes behaviorism as an alternate route to political science that never fully expanded but never went away, a prelude to the rational choice. In a sense, once a part of the political science community got a taste of a mathematical and modeled approach, those ideas stuck. Today, as with the example of the Perestroika meeting in San Francisco, there is clearly a shift in the internal dynamics of the political science community due to rational choice. It is certainly not a fad, but at the same time, it is only a movement towards a greater shift within the political science community. The scientific revolution here has not resulted in a ruling paradigm of rational choice (as it is in the minority view), but the revolution is one of incorporation of it into political science as a whole. It is incorporated into a traditionalist approach, and to the displeasure of many political scientists. The ideas of incorporating statistics into research and theory blend in with the traditional paradigm of political science, and are even mildly accepted by those who may even be threatened by a rational choice takeover. But since rational choice cannot be considered a normal research method that has created a universal model for all political scientists, it cannot be a paradigm....