Neither Goethe nor Bismarck: on the Link between Theory and Empirics in Council Decision-Making Studies

In a spirited attack, Dorothée Heisenberg takes issue with the emerging field of quantitatively-oriented European Union studies in general and the formal modelling tradition in the exploration of Council of Minister decisionmaking in particular. Drawing on her important article on the ‘culture of consensus’ (Heisenberg 2005), she argues in Chapter 14 above that rationalist scholarship is incapable of enlightening the wheeling and dealing that characterizes decision-making within the intergovernmental legislative body of the European Union. Before I delve in this response into the specific complaints by Heisenberg about the imagined and real limitations of rational choice theory and the Decision-making in the European Union project (DEU), I first position the Heisenberg chapter into the more general discussion in political science about the merits of formal models. To this end, I will distinguish between two possible ways in which we can read her chapter. Given my cultural background, I call these the ‘Bismarck’ and the ‘Goethe’ perspectives on the role of theory in political science. While the Bismarckian position advocates artful participatory insights rather than theory-driven empirical research as the way to understand politics, we should, according to Goethe’s Mephisto in Faust I, privilege empirical experience over theoretical reasoning. As will become explicit in the following, I completely disagree with the first interpretation and would also like to qualify the second one severely. I will then dissect the Heisenberg argument, showing where she is definitively wrong and where she is at least half right.