Conference Papers & Current Trends
Discussion of Rational Choice Theory
Round 7: Commentary
Evelyne Huber & Michelle Dion
Gill (1998) develops an RC model to explain in church-state relations in Latin America. He assumes that both church and state normally prefer cooperation and will initiate conflicts only when the opportunity costs of cooperation exceeded the benefits -- the benefits being legitimacy for the government and the capacity to maximize the parishioner base for the church. The analysis proper focuses on explaining the behavior of the Catholic Church, specifically the attitudes of the national episcopates takes toward the military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. The model predicts that the likelihood of conflict increases with religious competition and access to external funding, in the regime's decreasing popularity (1998, 70).
In the subsequent empirical analysis, though, in both the statistical model and compared it -- historical analysis, only one of these variables--religious competition --is systematically investigated. The decline of external funding comes up in the narrative to explain the general tendency of the Catholic Church in Latin America to soft-peddle it aggressive stance, beginning in the 1980s; but it is not used to explain differences among countries, as is the religious competition variable. The statistical model includes additional variables to test alternative explanations; namely poverty, repression, in the years of that bishops were appointed.
Though only religious competition appears as statistically significant, inclusion of bishops' years of appointment increases the model's explanatory power. This measure is but an inexact proxy for the influence of progressive currents within the national church. That it nonetheless improves the model lends support to previous explanations of the behavior of the Catholic Church in Latin America.
Gill's book introduces an important new variable and thereby clearly makes a major contribution by enhancing our understanding of the church's behavior. The propositions derived from the rational choice model, however, other then the impact of this one variable, are not systematically tested and empirically. Thus, the rational choice analysis per se contributes relatively little to the explanation, except perhaps by having it generated the idea about the importance of religious competition to begin with.