The Perspective of Economics

Robert Tollison

Chapter 13 in Readings in Public Choice and Constitutional Political Economy, 2008, pp 191-209 from Springer

Abstract: I address public choice from the perspective of economics in this essay. The “perspective of economics” is taken to mean the application of the principles of maximizing behavior and demand and supply to institutions and behavior in the political world. I begin with a discussion of this familiar methodology, and then proceed to illustrate how the principles of maximizing behavior and demand and supply can be applied to the various component parts of a representative democracy, including the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, as well as interest groups, bureaucracy, and voters. This will be in no sense a review of the literature. The point is to illustrate how economic principles can be applied to political behavior in each of the above contexts. In each case a single and simple illustration will be given. In such a way, the reader can decide whether the economic perspective really adds anything to the understanding of political behavior over and above alternative analyses. For example, do we learn more about a legislator’s behavior with an assumption that he acts in his self-interest or in the “public interest?” Finally, although many of the illustrations are related to U.S. political processes, I endeavor in each case to generalize the discussion to an international setting.

Keywords: Interest Group; Public Choice; Wealth Transfer; Electoral College; Electoral Vote (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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:spr:sprchp:978-0-387-75870-1_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9780387758701

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-75870-1_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

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