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Rational Irrationality and Simulation in Environmental Politics: The Example of Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Mathew Humphrey
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Abstract

Do western publics make ‘demands’ for environmental policy that they have no desire to see enacted? The thesis that they do has been put forward recently by advocates of the ‘post-ecologist’ paradigm such as Ingolfur Blühdorn. Taking the example of climate change, this article assesses survey results that provide indicative evidence that such ‘simulative’ demands may exist. I suggest that such demands are, however, best explained through conceptual tools available from game-theoretic and rational-actor models of political behaviour, in particular rational ignorance and rational irrationality, rather than with the societal-level accounts preferred by Blühdorn and others.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , 2009 , pp. 146 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009.

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References

2 See his Post-Ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm, London, Routledge, 2000; ‘Sustaining the Unsustainable: Symbolic Politics and the Politics of Simulation’, Environmental Politics, 16 (2007), pp. 251–75;CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘The Third Transformation of Democracy: On the Efficient Management of Late-Modern Complexity’, in Ingolfur Blühdorn and Uwe Jun (eds), Economic Efficiency – Democratic Empowerment. Contested Modernization in Britain and Germany, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, pp. 299–331.

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