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Abstract
A developing research program of behavioral political economy can help shed light on important social and political practices that fall outside the strict rational actor model but that are of central importance to democratic theory. Those practices include the deliberative activities of argumentation, information acquisition, and learning. Game theoretic models and experimental studies of collective decisions that are part of the behavioral political economy tradition offer insights into the strategic implications of these practices, linking them to ideological polarization and measures of the informational quality of individual and collective choices. In so doing, they help generate comprehensive assessments of these practices and their institutional influences, thus buttressing the normative philosophical arguments.

This article develops an account of a theory of rational choice based on the conception of rationality as a normatively justified correspondence between interests and choices. In this conception, rationality is best thought of as a property not of individual actions, but of a complex two-level phenomenon comprised of the social justification of behavioral norms and of the everyday choices made under these norms.

This article develops an account of a theory of rational choice based on the conception of rationality as a normatively justified correspondence between interests & choices. In this conception, rationality is best thought of as a property not of individual actions, but of a complex two-level phenomenon comprised of the social justification of behavioral norms & of the everyday choices made under these norms. Figures, References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright 2006.]

Discusses varied opinions and debates about rational choice theory and methodology.

Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design.