Public Choice: The Attempt

Hugh Stretton and Lionel Orchard

Chapter 5 in Public Goods, Public Enterprise, Public Choice, 1994, pp 123-162 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Most public choice theory rests on four assumptions: (i) individual material self-interest sufficiently motivates most economic behaviour, which (ii) is sufficiently understood by the use of neoclassical economic theory; and since (iii) the same individual material self-interest sufficiently motivates most political behaviour, (iv) that also may be sufficiently understood by the use of the same neoclassical economic theory. We dispute all four assumptions but lest our account of them be thought unfair, here is how a wholly sympathetic surveyor of public choice theory introduces it: Public choice can be defined as the economic study of non-market decisionmaking, or simply the application of economics to political science. The subject matter of public choice is the same as that of political science: the theory of the state, voting rules, voter behavior, party politics, the bureaucracy, and so on. The methodology of public choice is that of economics, however. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer.1

Keywords: Public Good; Public Choice; Pareto Optimum; Pareto Frontier; Political Behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23505-6_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349235056

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23505-6_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().