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A rational economic hypothesis of the citizen's decision to vote or not in US presidential elections by W. H. Riker & P. C. Ordeshook ("A Theory of the Calculus of Voting," American Political Science Review, 1968, 62, 25-42) has been cited as an example of the replacement of social-psychologically oriented "empirical generalizations" (A. Campbell et al., THE AMERICAN VOTER, New York, NY: Wiley, 1964) by axiomatically based deductive propositions in political science. However, close scrutiny shows that the rational economic paradigm is no more accurate a theory than previously popular systems analysis or functional paradigms. The claimed verification of the original hypothesis was based on an apparently imprecise, ad hoc ordinal procedure that could not distinguish between the intimately-related rational economic & social-psychological hypotheses. A more powerful mathematical statistical technique resolves the issue in favor of the latter model for the data used by Riker & Ordeshook, ie, the Survey Research Center's American National Election studies for 1952, 1956, & 1960. 3 Tables. Modified HA.