Politics and the Architecture of Choice: Bounded Rationality and Governance

Politics and the Architecture of Choice draws on work in political science, economics, cognitive science, and psychology to offer an innovative theory of how people and organizations adapt to change and why these adaptations don’t always work. Our decision-making capabilities, Jones argues, are both rational and adaptive. But because our rationality is bounded and our adaptability limited, our actions are not based simply on objective information from our environments. Instead, we overemphasize some factors and neglect others, and our inherited limitations-such as short-term memory capacity-all act to affect our judgment.

Jones shows how we compensate for and replicate these limitations in groups by linking the behavioral foundations of human nature to the operation of large-scale organizations in modern society. Situating his argument within the current debate over the rational choice model of human behavior, Jones argues that we should begin with rationality as a standard and then study the uniquely human ways in which we deviate from it.

Bryan D. Jones is the Donald R. Matthews Professor of American Politics and director of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at the University of Washington. He is the author of Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics and the coauthor, with Frank Baumgartner, of Agendas and Instability in American Politics, both published by the University of Chicago Press.