Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

334Chapter 8decisions that are rational insofar as they take into account theaggregation of individual interests of equal weight. More recently,the discussion over the "voter's paradox" has inaugurated a certainshift. On the premise of exclusively self-interested behavior, thefact that citizens bother to vote at all could only be explained by ahypothesis that soon proved false: the level of voter turnout doesnot vary with the voters' expectation that a single vote possiblycould decide a head-to-head race. Consequently, proponents expandedthe egocentric rational-choice model by bringing in theconcept of a metapreference, so that the model could includeethical, albeit self-regarding, considerations.7 In the end, however,the empirical evidence spoke against all models that were premisedon egocentric decision making (however expanded) and thatdisregarded how changes in interests and value orientations relateto social context.8 The most recent revisions consider, for example,the "laundering" effect of institutional arrangements that givepriority to normative reasons. In this way, institutionalized procedurescan foster "responsible" political action: "To act responsibly,then, is for the agent to evaluate his or her own actions bymethodically taking the critical perspectives, simultaneously and inthe futurum exactum, of the expert, the generalized other, and ofhimself or herself. By assuming this triple perspective, the actorvalidates the criteria of action substantively, socially, and temporally."9With the perspective of Mead's "generalized other," ClausOffe approaches the concept of an opinion- and will-formationthat, as I will show, explodes the conceptual framework of anempiricist theory of action.Systems theory immediately abandons the notion of individual andcollective agency. In the face of immense complexes of increasingorganizational density, it resolutely concludes that society shouldbe conceived as a network of autonomous subsystems, each ofwhich is encapsulated in its own semantics and has all the othersystems for its environment. Only the modes of operation internalto each system, and not the intentions or interests of participatingactors, are decisive for interactions between such systems.lO Thischoice of conceptual strategy results, on the one hand, in therejection of a hierarchical concept of society centered in the state.Even the political system, which is specialized for generating