Weak Models, Nil Hypotheses, And Decorative Statistics

Donald Green and Ian Shapiro contend that rational choice models have made negligible contributions to the empirical study of politics. Published tests systematically violate some basic research principles, they say, and they ascribe the problem to modelers' universalist aim of explaining all human behavior. This review critiques some of the authors' principles, which seem to derive from an extreme form of Popperianism combined with norms around null hypothesis testing. Their attribution of universalism is exaggerated; what they are seeing is actually a desire to unify different selected areas, a basic goal in theoretical explanation. One advantage of rational choice models is that they frequently make precise predictions. Models that can do this offer an escape from the uninformative ritual of null hypotheses tests.