ABSTRACT
Rational Choice, the brash self-conscious teenage rebel of the 1980s, now goes to the o ce every day and engages in routine, productive interaction with those who once found him alarming. Although rational choice has a long history in economics and political science, very few students of Latin American politics used it before the redemocratization of most Latin American countries in the 1980s. The return of democratic politics, however, brought in its wake the spread of rational choice theories about politics as analysts sought interesting ways to understand democratic decision making, campaign strategies, and party behavior. These initial e orts to extend theories that had been developed to study politics in the United States and Western Europe to Latin America sometimes met with hostility or mysti cation from other scholars who found the approach simplistic or misguided. Now, however, the rational choice approach has become so integrated into the standard way analysts think about some topics, that most research that makes use of its basic elements does not mention rational choice or make its standard assumptions explicit because readers understand without being told. Some analysts who depend on the basic assumptions of the rational choice approach to underpin the logic of their arguments may not even be aware that they are doing so, and the edges between rational choice and other approaches have become blurred, as most scholars combine it with empirical research and arguments drawn from other intellectual traditions. Currently, few studies ignore the insights provided by rational choice completely, and fewer still limit themselves to ideas from rational choice alone.
