Intellectual foundations of public choice, the forest from the trees

Roger Congleton

Public Choice, 2018, vol. 175, issue 3, No 2, 229-244

Abstract: Abstract After War World II, a group of scholars began using rational choice models from economics and game theory to examine the manner in which public policies would be determined if men and women were as “rational” in their political activities as they were in other spheres of life. The implications of such an approach to politics were not obvious and took decades to be worked out. Indeed, they are still being worked out. The result was a new field of research that deepened our understanding of economic and political systems and their many interdependencies. This review essay provides an overview of the core findings of public choice during its first half century and of the boot-strapping process through which those findings emerged. Those core findings provide the idea base and results that ground most contemporary public choice research.

Keywords: Public choice; Science as a spontaneous order; Bootstrapping; Methodology; Key results; Theory of elections; Theory of interest groups; Constitutional political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B2 D7 H1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-018-0545-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:175:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-018-0545-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-018-0545-1

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().