Theda Skocpol

Commentary
Theory Tackles History

Five Smart People in Search of a Mission would be an ideal title for this pro-
vocative collection. Analytic Narratives has overblown methodological and
theoretical pretensions, yet it is interesting all the same. Not only is each
chapter valuable on its own; the book as a whole reveals much about the
strengths and pitfalls of rational choice theorizing in comparative politics.
Political scientists Robert Bates, Margaret Levi, and Barry Weingast and
economists Avner Greif and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal are scholars who work

Social Science History 24:4 (winter 2000).

Copyright © 2000 by the Social Science History Association.
670 Social Science History

somewhat against the grain of rational choice in the social sciences today.
Rational choice scholars are often more preoccupied with elaborating models
than with solving empirical puzzles. And in political science many ‘‘rats’’
(as they are affectionately called by colleagues of other persuasions) model
strategic interactions within well-bounded formal institutions such as legis-
latures or electoral systems. These five authors do not play it so safe, how-
ever. Ranging across time and space from medieval Genoa and early mod-
ern France and England to the nineteenth-century United States and the
twentieth-century world economy, they grapple with interrelations between
politics and economics, with intersections of transnational and local pro-
cesses, and with messy maneuvers about the emergence, persistence, and
transformation of institutional arrangements. These authors have spent years
discussing their projects with one another, but they go beyond mutual edifica-
tion. In comparative politics, this is the Era of Manifestos, as clashing camps
of scholars maneuver for students, positions, resources, and academic pres-
tige. So Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast decided to excerpt their
various book-length projects for one coauthored book that would make the
case for rational choice modeling in historical research and promote what they
claim is a new methodology for comparative politics.
On the methodological front, there is actually little here that is new. In an
introductory pronouncement similar to others throughout the book, the au-
thors declare that the ‘‘phrase analytic narrative captures our conviction that
theory linked to data is more powerful than either theory or data alone’’ (3).
Well, yes, that’s true. But how many social scientists would doubt it? These
authors pat themselves on the back for in-depth engagement with specific
cases, for moving back and forth between history and abstract models. ‘‘Our
approach is narrative; it pays close attention to stories, accounts, and context.
It is analytic in that it extracts explicit and formal lines of reasoning, which
facilitate both exposition and explanation’’ (10). Actually, few ‘‘lines of rea-
soning’’ are extracted from cases. Instead, the standard tool kit of formal game
theory is carried to each site, where the author deploys the particular model-
ing tool or tools he or she thinks will illuminate parts of the historical case at
hand.
An approach stressing the value of moving back and forth between con-
texts and models is surely to be welcomed as a useful antidote to the wrong-
headed notion that social scientists should deduce propositions before con-
 Theory Tackles History 671

fronting rich empirical data. But the word narrative is used loosely. Even
when specific puzzles lend themselves to dramatic posing as stories with be-
ginnings, middles, and ends, not everyone in this book uses chronological nar-
ratives to pose questions or tease out explanations. The best uses of narrative
appear in the chapters by Greif, who recounts the emergence, persistence,
and eclipse of the Genoan podesteria, and by Bates, who tells of the rise and
fall of the International Coffee Organization. But for the most part, these au-
thors simply shift back and forth between selectively described vignettes and
exercises in modeling applied to the slices of each case that best fit the tools
at hand.
Throughout this volume, transitions from description to modeling are
awkwardly executed. Chapters read more like working papers than finished
products. The reader cannot always grasp the historical story or understand
why elaborate diagrams are presented. At their best, historical social scien-
tists find more elegant ways to display models, develop hypotheses, and pre-
sent critical tests. These authors, however, highlight their working approach,
moving back and forth between models and historical vignettes. They con-
vey the valuable message that ‘‘the construction of analytic narratives is an
iterative process.’’ Nevertheless, readers already convinced of the value of it-
eration may wish that these authors recognized the difference between rou-
tines of inquiry and the stylistic requisites of coherent (not to say compelling)
presentation.
Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast lay out five straightforward
criteria for deciding whether rational choice explanations of case materials are
sound. These perfectly sensible principles could have come from any good
methods textbook: (1) Do the model’s assumptions fit the facts as they are
known? (2) Do conclusions follow from premises? (3) Do implications of a
model find confirmation in the data, as the investigator examines the data,
deploys an apparently appropriate model, derives testable implications, and
checks to see if they are borne out? (4) How well does the theory stand up by
comparisons with other explanations? And, finally, (5) how general is the ex-
planation? Does it apply to other cases? In the remainder of my essay, I com-
ment on how well these requisites are met. But I cannot do full justice to every
chapter. Just as these authors use models selectively, I will refer to their chap-
ters here and there, picking illustrations from the historical periods I know
best.
672 Social Science History

Any body of theory can be explored in relation to historical cases, but

the ‘‘theory’’ used here is ‘‘rational choice theory and, most often, . . . the
theory of games’’ (3). Because established formal models are regularly in-
voked, and logics are often spelled out mathematically, criterion 2 is not much
at issue. But questions about appropriate assumptions (criterion 1) and em-
pirically interesting implications (criterion 3) go to the heart of the matter.
Critics often question the added value of rational choice theory when applied
to real-world contexts, suggesting that the assumptions of models are not met
and the implications are often banal. The authors of AN believe their contri-
butions refute such charges, and I agree that many arguments presented in
this book illustrate the usefulness of applying strategic theories to historical
processes of certain types.
Rational choice models require that we identify strategizing actors—
whether individuals or organizations—and typify the preferences they pur-
sue in interaction with other actors. Once the actors and preferences are spec-
ified, we can play out formal logics to arrive at fresh empirical insights or
generate testable implications. In most of this book, the authors are able to
take such steps plausibly. And where they can identify types of actors and as-
sign preferences that accord reasonably well with historical data on motives
or stated aims, they use game-theoretic logics to play out possible outcomes
of repeated interactions under various conditions. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal,
for example, assigns empirically reasonable preferences to the monarchs and
landed-commercial elites who dominated politics in early modern Western
Europe. He is then able to show that variations in the value of warfare and
the fiscal structure of the economy make sense of the different trajectories
of taxation and absolutist authority in Britain and France. Similarly, Barry
Weingast makes defensible presumptions about the preferences of regional
and political party actors in the pre–Civil War United States and can illumi-
nate maneuvers over the ‘‘balance rule’’ governing the admission of slave and
free states to the expanding Union.
Where actors are plausibly identified, where actors truly were maneu-
vering in self-conscious relation to one another, and where imputed prefer-
ences are empirically reasonable, rational choice theorizing illuminates the
play of events and allows us to specify conditions favoring alternative possible
outcomes. Rational choice modeling under such conditions can be a valuable
antidote to traditional tendencies to assign reified identities or logics to entire
societies or eras. With the assistance of strategic models, we can connect out-
 Theory Tackles History 673

comes to particular actors maneuvering through time, and we can pinpoint

conditions that frustrate expectations—as Weingast does in his discussion of
the obstacles faced by U.S. Democrats in the 1850s.
On the other hand, when rational choice scholars typify actors and alter-
natives and preferences in unconvincing ways, they themselves produce ob-
fuscating reifications. For example, Margaret Levi develops a convincing
model of nineteenth-century French political decisions about military re-
cruitment but then tries to analyze American politics as an interplay of the
same sorts of actors and preferences she uses to analyze France. Levi asks why
modernizing military regimes get rid of commutation and substitution in the
recruitment of soldiers. She assumes that these practices created favoritism
for the privileged in the United States as they did in France. But actually, in
the United States such practices occurred in the absence of state bureauc-
racy and were not associated with class inequities in military recruitment (see
Geary 1991). On the contrary, there was much less class inequity in the re-
cruitment of soldiers for the Union Civil War than there would be later, in
World War I, after substitution and commutation were abolished and a uni-
versal ‘‘selective service’’ draft was instituted in the United States. In her
chapter for this volume (though not in her other writings), Levi not only
makes unwarranted assumptions about actors and preferences; she also uses
rational choice ideas in metaphorical rather than precise ways. She speaks, for
example, of the legislative ‘‘pivot’’ and the preferences of the ‘‘rural bourgeoi-
sie, farmers, and urban bourgeoisie’’ (137) in Civil War congressional votes
about military recruitment without ever analyzing any actual congressional
votes or presenting more than the thinnest anecdotal evidence about actual
citizen preferences on military issues. Because Levi ignores the distinctive in-
stitutional, political, and class contexts of the United States, the result is an
argument that makes little sense of America. Indeed, her argument misses the
main irony about American military recruitment—that it became more class-
biased, not less, as the nation modernized. This trajectory was the opposite
of that in France, and we need to theorize about institutional contexts and
the intersection of political organizations and social structures to understand
important cross-national variations.
Another pitfall for rational choice theorizing about history is equally on
display in this book. Not only do formal theorists sometimes overgeneral-
ize and apply concepts unconvincingly, they can also engage in very selec-
tive analysis. Game-theoretic models are likely to make sense only of certain
674 Social Science History

kinds of historical situations, where there really were sets of actors deliber-
ately maneuvering in relation to one another. But not all historical processes
of interest take this form. Often, actors are blindsided by massive contex-
tual changes or tweaked by unfolding processes they do not comprehend. At
times, brand new actors appear on the scene, such as the Republican Party
in the 1850s. Weingast’s descriptive account of the United States leading into
the Civil War barely mentions the Republicans and only hints that socio-
economic changes and influxes of foreign immigrants changed the ground
on which elected politicians and vote-seeking parties maneuvered. Weingast
concentrates massive modeling energy on accounting for the balance rule and
votes in Congress. In the end, his modeling can only go so far toward explain-
ing the most important transformations—and conjunctures of separately de-
termined processes—that actually undermined sectional compromises in the
1850s and brought the outbreak of war in 1861.Weingast barely acknowledges
this; he leaves the impression that the maneuvers addressed by his models are
the main story. But this is a case of tools determining the problems they are
applied to, rather than the problems guiding our choice of theoretical ideas.
Historical institutionalists can accept many of Weingast’s ponderously expli-
cated points about party maneuvers and congressional votes but can still hy-
pothesize that macroscopic conjunctures of separate processes must be ana-
lyzed to explain disunion and Civil War.

AN, in short, displays both the strengths and weaknesses of rational choice
ideas applied to historical cases. In a sense, this book does for rational choice
theory what earlier books did by applying structure-functionalism in soci-
ology and political science to assorted historical cases. AN shows that theo-
retical concepts can be effectively applied here and there, but it does not
establish that rational choice arguments are better than the best alternative
explanations.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘‘theory’’ in comparative politics referred
to models of ‘‘social systems’’ with differentiated and interrelated function-
ing parts, and social change tended to be characterized as a set of ‘‘modern-
izing’’ transformations from undifferentiated ‘‘traditional’’ social systems to
complex ‘‘modern’’ systems. Systems theorists were different from today’s
rational choice theorists in many respects, but they shared a determination to
generalize across times and places. Interestingly, a leader of that old structure-
functional school, Gabriel Almond, is quoted on the back of AN. Almond
 Theory Tackles History 675

praises the five authors for fruitfully applying theory to history and taking
‘‘important steps toward reestablishing an intellectual community in the so-
cial sciences.’’ I find this praise apropos, for today’s rational choicers, like
yesterday’s structure-functionalists, believe in One True and Unified Theory
and cling to a model of explanation that stresses that application of general
theorems to specific instances, one at a time.
This notion of explanation is very much at odds with the approach fa-
vored by analytically oriented comparative-historical scholars, like myself.We
believe in identifying patterns of variation in history and testing alternative
theoretical hypotheses about causes. For comparative analysts, it hardly suf-
fices to apply available general models to selected aspects of cases, one at a
time.We want to know not just whether it fits but whether our hypothesis ac-
counts for more variation, or accounts for variation in more convincing depth,
than do alternative theoretical arguments other scholars might favor.
Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast invoke as the fourth prin-
ciple in their list of criteria for effective theories that they must explain pat-
terns and outcomes more effectively than alternative arguments. But in this
book, they do little to pose rational choice models against powerful alterna-
tives. True, some chapters argue with what they label conventional wisdom,
but these are usually straw-man arguments, not arguments representing the
most convincing alternatives.
Where there are powerful social science literatures addressing processes
or outcomes modeled by these authors, they are routinely ignored. The com-
parative-historical analysis of European state formation is, for example, a
much-tilled field. Outstanding comparative-historical political sociologists
and political scientists have written dozens of books in this area. Recent,
prize-winning breakthroughs are embodied in major works like Thomas Ert-
man’s Birth of the Leviathan (1997) and Brian Downing’s The Military Revo-
lution and Political Change (1992). These and other highly relevant works do
not even appear in Jean-Laurent Rosenthal’s list of references. He simply
ignores the competition and proceeds as if he is the first ‘‘scientist’’ on the
scene, newly arrived to convert the primitive natives of theory-free history.
Rosenthal is hardly atypical; rational choice scholars engage in this kind of
studied ignorance about their chief theoretical competitors all the time. Thus
we cannot tell from their articles and books read in isolation whether the
models they deploy really improve upon what is already well known in the
social sciences. We can tell whether models are plausible but not whether
676 Social Science History

they advance knowledge, as opposed to merely doing more ponderously what

others have already done before.
Rational choice theorizing applied case by case to heavily massaged and
selected historical vignettes may, in the end, amount to little more than com-
ing full circle back to where structure-functionalists left off in the 1960s.
Gabriel Almond and his fellow structure-functionalists dominated the jour-
nals and book publishing lists of their day. They applied jargon-ridden con-
ceptual schemes again and again—and, behold, the concepts invariably ‘‘fit’’
the cases, at least after some wiggling around. But structure-functional theory
became increasingly bloodless over time. Its proponents talked to one another
in fuzzy ‘‘communities’’ but had less and less to say about the ironies, the
twists and turns, the conjunctures, and the reversals of history. They got tied
up in elaborating their concepts rather than addressing the most pressing
issues of social and political transformation. In the end, the structure-func-
tionalists were simply bypassed by analytically minded comparativists who
developed powerful sets of middle-range propositions about revolutions, the
emergence of democracies, the rise and transformations of modern welfare
states, and many other major phenomena of concern to more than just aca-
demics.
Rational choicers are, as Gabriel Almond recognizes, today’s successors
to the Grand Theorizers of old. Will they do better at applying theory to
history than their structure-functionalist forebears did? Only if they eschew
the aim of inward-looking community and do a much better job of recog-
nizing and engaging competing explanatory frameworks. By plunging into
the messiness of real-world puzzles, the authors of AN have taken some long
steps in the right direction. But there are many more miles to go.

References
Downing, Brian (1992) The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democ-
racy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Ertman, Thomas (1997) Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Geary, James W. (1991) We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War. Dekalb: North-
ern Illinois University Press.