Rational Choice Institutionalism
This school attempts to explain collective choices by rational actors. Outcomes are a product of the interaction between actor preferences and institutional rules.
Rational institutionalists also regard institutions as themselves being rationally chosen by actors who view the rules as facilitating the pursuit of their goals. For example, the institutional decision-making rules of the European Union are such that the largest states can structure political outcomes.
Read more about this topic: Institutionalism In International Relations
Famous quotes containing the words rational and/or choice:
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)
“But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,—”Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)