ABSTRACT
This chapter explores areas of potential conceptual congruence between the rational choice perspective and contemporary approaches to radical behaviorism. It seeks at a general level to renew exploration of areas of fundamental commonality between the conceptual bases of the rational choice perspective and radical behavior analysis. The source of the rules that affect and determine political behavior is ideology. The virtue of the rational choice approach to the problems of political violence is that it gives a methodological and conceptual framework from which to develop some form of understanding and offers avenues to empirically explore initiatives to effect change. The challenge of political violence to both rational choice and behavior analysis approaches is quite clear. The chapter addresses this challenge by discussing three interrelated issues: the dynamic of behavior; the role of ideology as a form of rule governance; and the distinction between involvement and events in politically extreme behavior.
