Essays on Political Actors and Attitudes: Do They Constitute Distributed Reflexivity? Part 2: A Dynamical Typology of Rationality

Abstract

What is the relationship between the logic that guides political attitudes of constituencies and the logic of political actors, whose legitimacy is rooted in electoral choice of the constituencies? Classical approaches, such as the median voter theorem, view political actors as passively mirroring voters’ preferences. An alternative approach, that we suggested in the first part of this series of essays, assumes that how constituencies see the competences of political actors, is crucial, in the sense that it does not only reflect voters’ preferences, but it is also manipulable by the agency of political actors themselves. In this article we provide additional arguments in support of the thesis that the perception of competences is socially constructed and contextually dependent. We hypothesise that in times of well-being the logic of appropriateness prevails among both the constituencies and their political representatives, while in times of crisis constituencies resort to the logic of arguing, and leaders predominantly use the logic of consequences with some admixtures of the logic of arguing. Our arguments draw on Raymond Boudon’s neo-Weberian “judicatory” or “cognitivist” model of rationality; on the theory of securitisation developed by Barry Buzan and his collaborators, under the influence of “speech act” theory of John Austin; and on the typology of basic logics of action, first proposed by James March and Johan Olsen, and later refined by Thomas Risse, under the influence of Jürgen Habermas.