M5public Choice.

Cambridge Journal of Economics 1997, 21, 409-430
CRITICAL SURVEY
This is the latest in our series of Critical Survey articles. The aim of the series is to report on recent developments, to provide an assessment of alternative approaches and to suggest lines of future inquiry. The intention is that the articles should be accessible not only to other academic researchers but also to students and others more practically involved in the economy. Earlier Survey articles include Chris Freeman on 'The Economics of Technical Change', Allm Cottrell on 'Post-Keynesian Monetary Economies', Herbert Hovenkamp on 'Law and Economics in the United States', Warren Samuels on 'Institutional Economies', Philip Arestis on 'PostKeynesian Economics' and Sheila Dow on 'Economic Methodology'.
Public choice
Lionel Orchard and Hugh Stretton*
The distinctive elements of public choice theory were published by Americans between 1949 and 1971. Most later writing has applied, modified or retreated from the original structure of theory. Partly because of the qualities which it combines and partly because its practitioners combine them in different proportions, the theory can be characterised as: (i) another attempt at a rigorous, axiomatic general theory of government; (ii) a vision of politics as a marketplace for individual exchanges, best understood by the use of neoclassical economic theory; or (iii) a selective analysis of political activity designed to discredit government and persuade people to reduce its scope. Most of the theorists explain most political behaviour as motivated mainly or solely by individual material self-interest. This paper reviews the effects of that on public choice analyses of voters', politicians', bureaucrats', judges' and other gain-seekers' behaviour, and on the theorists' proposals for reform. It concludes with some assessments of the work, and speculation about its prospects.
Introduction T h e most-quoted definition of public choice theory is Dennis Mueller's: Public choice can be defined as the economic study of non-market decision-making, 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 behaviour, 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. (Mueller, 1989, pp. 1-2) Manuscript received 16 October 1995;finalversion received 23 February 1996. *The Flinders University of South Australia and the University of Adelaide, respectively. The authors thank Jonathan Pincus and Mark E. Maggjo for helpful advice. O Cambridge Political Economy Society 1997
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L. Orchard and H. Stretton
People fiace one set of options and constraints in the private sphere, and another set in the public sphere. Economists study their responses to die options and prices in die one; why not in die odier? Some public choice dieorists put most emphasis on die desire for material goods as shaping political behaviour (and dierefore dieir causal analyses of it). Others add a strong concern for freedom: a preference for individually bargained radier dian collectively constrained or coerced choices of material and otiier goods. These explore political systems for dieir likeness and unlikeness to market systems of exchange, and for possibilities of increasing die scope for bargaining and exchange when people act togedier for purposes which cannot be servedor not as wellby independent action. Public choice dieorists distinguish four schools of diought, centred at Virginia, Rochester, Chicago and Indiana. The Virginia School is die best known and includes die most reformist writers, who would like to impose constitutional limits on majority rule, especially on die power to tax. The Rochester School, led by William Riker, makes much use of rational choice dieory and game dieory of political behaviour, and of madiematical reasoning in studies of voting, log-rolling, interest groups and bureaucracy. The Chicago School shares members and assumptions widi die Chicago School of Law and Economics, whose reviewer in diis journal called it 'rigorously neoclassical in die sense diat it rests on strong assumptions of utility and profit maximisation . . . [and is] highly analytic and anti-historical' (Hovenkamp, 1995, p. 334). The Indiana School, led by die political scientists Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, attempts some tense but interesting reconciliations between individual self-interest and communitarian culture, and between coercion and voluntary cooperation in government. Critics focus on die scientific claims and die conservative cast of much public choice writing. Scientifically, it is anodier in die long line of failed attempts at a rigorous, axiomatic, general dieory of government. Ideologically, many of die dieorists are accused of selecting for study only diose shortcomings of government which suggest reducing it radier dian improving it; or else diey merely search government for instances of corruption or unproductive gain-seeking and generalise diem as die nature of all democratic government. The case studies can be valuable, diough die generalisations are not. Public choice dieory may be more use to investigators dian to forecasters, and should perhaps be recast in investigative form. Just as padiology alerts doctors to possible illnesses, and experience alerts detectives to possible crimes, public choice dieory may alert investigators of governments to a range of malfunctions which can reduce dieir justice or efficiency in particular cases. Homo economicus Public choice dieorists began by insisting, as some still do, diat individual material self-interest alone determines political behaviour. They characterise traditional political dieory, which diey hope to replace, as 'die public interest school' and accuse itfalsely, we will presendy argueof ignoring the play of private interests in politics (Rowley, 1993, Vol. HI, pp. 585, 590-4; and many odiers). That principle was generalised to all political activity by Andiony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). Economists, he argued, should treat government as a working part of die economy, not a force external to it. As widi odier economic actors, it is by private interest diat
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government is motivated to perform its social function. Just as miners dig coal for others in order to earn income for themselves, 'each political party is a team of men who seek office solely in order to enjoy the income, prestige and power that go with running the government apparatus . . . Thus their social functionwhich is to formulate and carry out policies when in power as the governmentis accomplished as a by-product of their private motive which is to attain the income, power and prestige of being in office.' As for the politicians, so for the citizens: 'each of them views elections strictly as means of selecting the government most beneficial to him.' (Downs, 1957A, pp. 135-8) But most citizens do not know enough to vote for their interests effectively, and because each vote counts for so little it would not be rational for them to spend time finding out. Capitalists and their lobbyists, therefore, exert disproportionate influence on policy. The government market is not an efficient one. Five years later Downs recanted. In 'The public interest: its meaning in a democracy' (1962), he acknowledged die mixed motivation of political behaviour. People and politicians havehowever vaguelyvisions of a good society. Ideas of common good and public interest serve as criteria for judging the quality of government; mey lead people to accept policies which conflict with their individual interests; they guide bureaucrats when they have no other instructions. The shared values and rules of behaviour 'are part of the basic culture that is passed on from generation to generation and constantly reinforced through schools, family life, churches, and other institutions engaged in acculturation and social control.' As for the citizens, so for their intellectuals. 'As social scientists we should analyze the world realistically so that, as ethical men, we can design social mechanisms that utilize men's actual motives to produce social conditions as close as possible to our ideal of "the good society". Failure to be realistic about human nature would lead us to design social mechanisms that do not achieve their desired ends. Conversely, abandoning ideals leads to cynical nihilism. I hope my amended model will provide greater insight into how to go about making the real world more like the ideal one' (Downs, 1962, pp. 23-5, 33). Though he did not acknowledge it, Downs' amended model returned him to the liberal mainstream of J. S. Mill and T. H. Green. But the damage had been done: it is the 1957 model without the 1962 amendments that has lived on in the public choice canon. Before long William Niskanen would assert that 'the US federal government annually transfers around $30 billion to special interest groups other than the poor, the primary purpose of which is to induce around SI00 million in campaign contributions' (Niskanen, 1971, p. 207). Similar explanations have since been offered for all public goods. 'Most people are taken aback at such a . . . view of government. They wonder, well surely government is about something more than organized, legitimate theft? Yes, government does produce things in the rent-seeking theory of the state, but these are mere by-products of the fundamental transfers at stake. We thus get our national defense, roads, schools, and so on as an unintended consequence of the competition for wealth transfers . . . ' (ToUison, 1987, p. 155). Among public choice theorists Niskanen and Tollison are suppry-siders: extremists in depicting the politicians as the prime movers of government, and their policies as 'unintended' by-products of their 'legitimate theft'. Others, just as insistent on the dominance of self-interest, focus on the demand side. Programmes are initiated by the interest groups who will benefit from them. Others againimpartial market economistsinterest themselves in both sides and in the terms on which markets clear. We shall briefly review a number of aspects and institutions of government which have
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been modelled with homo economicus supplying the motive force, the simplifications and the theorists' principles of selection in their causal analyses. Log-rolling All political analysis notices exchanges of support between differently interested groups. The interests may be any mixture of selfish, disinterested and generous. Where political parties have bases of loyal support and effective party discipline, most of any log-rolling occurs within the parties as they arrive at their programmes. Where party organisations are loose and their members undisciplined, log-rolling tends to be incessant and at times unprincipled. Public choice contributors to the log-rolling literature tend to reflect American (or sometimes Third World) experience; to select self-interested dealing for study, and to explain it by reference to self-interested calculations of advantage; and to depict the process as the main or only way of putting legislative majorities together. If there are legislators with principled beliefs who simply vote for them and do not trade, most public choice investigators do not notice them. Buchanan (1993, p. 69) acknowledges that they exist, but thinks that democracy ensures that their self-interested competitors will always defeat them. If poor or weak minorities are tolerably treated by majorities, that is explained by reference to the changing composition of the majorities. That process is theorised more often than it is researched, but it is quite important to the theorists, who would otherwise have to allow the majorities to have some compassion and generosity (Tullock, 1959). It is in the nature of 'interest' politics that many legislators are disinterested most of the time, in the sense that most of the bills on which they must vote do not touch their particular interests. On those occasions they are free to vote for their conceptions of public interest and good governmentor to trade their votes in a partly or wholly unprincipled way for support in the cases which do concern them. Public choice writers tend to theorise the latter as the norm, and to select case studies which illustrate it. How fairly that represents American political behaviour, and how far it merely reflects the investigators' principles of selection, cannot be discovered by research shaped by that principle of selection. Work on log-rolling among interest groups overlaps work on the interest groups' relations with government. We give them separate headings because the theorists usually do. Interest groups Some effective seekers of government aid or protection are firms, the peak organisations of particular industries, or other interested parties. Many of them have an intense interest in influencing government because big gains are at stake. They are organised, they have resources, they can afford permanent lobbyists, so they can bring strong pressure and persuasion to bear on legislators or executive government. The favours they want may be at the expense of large numbers of taxpayers or consumers. Each of those will suffer only in minor or marginal ways; the damage is not very important to them; they may well not notice it, or be aware of its cause; they are not organised to resist it; so they do not, or, if they do, their resistance is ineffective. Concentrated pressure overcomes diffuse resistance.
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That describes some encounters between interest groups, taxpayers and consumers, and governments. Public choice scholars theorise from those cases, and usually select only those cases for empirical investigation. They accordingly deny in theory, and neglect in practice, a variety of different behaviour. Some interest groups succeed because the action they want also serves others' interests, some fail because contrary interests defeat them. Those cases accord with public choice theory, but others do not. Some interest groups succeed because governments and electors think their cause is just, or accords with public interests. (Public choice analysts may then refer to the politicians' self-interest in attracting votes, rather than to the moral or disinterested nature of the electors' beliefs.) Some action which benefits interest groups is initiated by governments or disinterested reformers concerned about unemployment, the balance of payments, inadequate investment, or whatever. Most Australian and some American tariffs have been initiated by governments; then bargained for by the industries they helped to develop; then reduced or abolished against those industries' wishes, partly because of changing industrial structure or strength, partly because of changing theoretical beliefs. The changing forces and beliefs at work are not easily detected or interrelated by investigators with public choice principles of selection. The theory of interest groups owes most to Mancur Olson, one of the few public choice theorists who observes US government from somewhere to the Left of it. Marxists used to see democratic government as the capitalists' enforcement arm. The New Right accuse it of the opposite sin of taxing the productive rich to finance enervating benefits for the idle poor. Olson's selective eye sees it taxing the masses to finance benefits for the rich, driven to do so by the power of rich interest groups. His The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965) is summarised by an approving reviewer: He noted that it is usually costly to establish interest groups; that existing groups have decisive advantages in political market competition; that groups offering concentrated benefits are more effective than those offering dispersed benefits; that small groups are more effective than large groups; and that groups that can coerce supply are more effective than those that cannot. Thus, the logic of collective action suggests that competition between pressure groups predictably distorts the political equilibrium in favour of policies preferred by effective interest groups, policies that provide concentrated benefits for a fewfinancedby dispersed taxes on the many. (Rowley, 1993, Vol. I, p. x) Where those processes do happen, Olson has a good eye for them. But when generalised as a dominant characteristic of democratic government, that selection of political behaviour does not explain, and is repeatedly belied by, other trends in democratic performance through the decades before and after Olson's book appeared. Public health and welfare services continued to expand and to take rising shares of national income. So did downward income transfers, consumer protection and environmental regulation. There was continuing net reduction of tariffs. Even within the US, the long trend to greater equality of income, which owed a good deal to government, was not reversed until some time after 1965. Far from dominating Congress or justifying a general theory of interest-group dominance in democracies, rich interest groups appear to have been losing more when Olson was not watching than they were winning when he was. The Logic of Collective Action explored some other selfish inefficiencies. In a rational egoists' world, collective action for common ends cannot happen on a voluntary basis, because each citizen will decide to leave the action to the others then freeload the bene-
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fits, so there will be no action and no benefits. Collective action has to be compulsory. But the usual forms of compulsion tend to have administrative costs, and to hinder competition and free exchange, so they restrict output and everyone gets less than they could have by voluntary cooperation. Amartya Sen explored this, and other self-defeating effects of strict selfishness and stria individualism, in 'The impossibility of a Paretian liberal' (1970B) and 'Rational fools: a critique of the behavioural foundations of economic theory* (1977). In varying degrees, people in different cultures do willingly cooperate for selfish, generous or simply enjoyable purposes: in recreation, in voluntary welfare services, to defend their neighbourhoods or other interests. It seems to be difficult for 'rational actor' theorists to either see or imagine those activities.
Bureaucrats
Gordon Tullock and Anthony Downs wrote books about the organisation of executive government. Tullock's The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) and Downs' Inside Bureaucracy (1967) are pessimistic but broad-minded accounts of bureaucratic experience. Tullock finds that '[t]here are important areas for which the economists' assumptions are clearly inapplicable, notably the governmental bureaucracy' to which 'the analysis of markets has very little application'. Private as well as public business needs bureaucratic organisation. Individual and corporate purposes can conflict, but good organisation and leadership consist in contriving the least conflict and the most identity between them. Downs also recognised a substantial role for public bureaucracy in a market economy. Bureaucrats are self-interested, but many of them also have genuine public concerns and some work hard and effectively at them. Dennis Mueller dismissed both books from his Public Choice surveys (1979, 1989) because they do not theorise bureaucracy 'from a public choice perspective'. The leading public choice theorist of bureaucracy is William Niskanen. Niskanen's Bureaucracy and Representative Government (1971) deals only with public bureaux. Their managers' concerns include their pay, perquisites, reputation, power, patronage, the output of the bureau, the ease of making changes, and the ease of managing the bureau. The first six always, and the last two sometimes, seem to Niskanen to vary with the size of the bureau's budget. So 'budget maximization should be an adequate proxy even for those bureaucrats with a relatively low pecuniary motivation and a relatively high motivation for making changes in the public interest'. Under that incessant pressure, government is bigger and dearer than it need be. To discipline it Niskanen would decentralise services; get more of them from competitive suppliers; reconstruct bureau managers' incentives; require two-thirds majorities for appropriation bills; and reduce taxation but make it more progressive, partly to stiffen resistance to it. That should 'generate a nearly optimum level of public services and a nearly general agreement on the size of government' (Niskanen, 1971, pp. 34-8, 2289). In Government by the Market? The Politics of Public Choice (1993, p. 34) Peter Self observes that 'as a general theory, Niskanen's is empirically wrong in almost all its facts'. Bureau chiefs' pay is not regularly related to their budgets or the numbers they command. Bureaux are not always monopolistic; they often expand by overlapping and duplicating each others' functions. Politicians have a number of effective ways of investigating bureaucratic costs and performance. Since Niskanen's book appeared, downsizing and privatising have become fashionable, and, with them, a supplementary monocausal theory. In Democracy, Bureaucracy and
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Public Choice: Economic Explanations in Political Science (1991) Patrick Dunleavy argues
that the bureau chiefs who do not want big budgets want instead 'to work in small, elite, collegial bureaus close to political power centres' (p. 202). This, which he calls 'bureau-shaping', is Dunleavy's rival model, and he sets out the conditions which may incline bureaucrats' choices to bureau-shaping or budget-maximising strategies. They are assumed to recommend public policies not for public reasons, but for the type of organisation that the policies will call for. Though some doubtless behave like that from time to time, it does not support a useful general theory of bureaucratic behaviour or policy advice. Judges It is hard to find judges of the US Supreme Court accepting bribes or political instructions. If politicians sell laws, why do not judges? This gap in public choice theory was filled in Chicago in 1975 by William Landes and Richard Posner in a paper on 'The Independent Judiciary in an Interest Group Perspective'. Legislatorsthey saidsell laws to interest groups for 'campaign contributions, votes, implicit promises of future favors, and sometimes outright bribes'. The prices are higher if the buyers expect the laws to last. They may not last if other grafters can buy or bully reinterpretations from the courts. So the politicians who wrote the US Constitution and the First Amendment gave the judges secure life tenure in order to increase politicians' incomes. Why are secure judges less likely to take bribes than are insecure judges? Market pricing explains why. Judges who are caught taking bribes risk dismissal. A tenured judge stands to lose more years of income than does a short-term judge. Secure judges are thus paid more for honesty, and so supply more if it. 'In our view', the authors conclude, 'the courts do not enforce the moral law or ideals of neutrality, justice or fairness; they enforce the "deals" made by effective interest groups with earlier legislators' (Landes and Posner, 1975, pp. 877, 894). James Buchanan liked that paper, but with two reservations. He thought that some laws were for everybody's benefit. And he raged against the Warren court for allowing social and ethical ideals to distort its judgments 'a role for the judiciary that is wholly inconsistent with the structure of constitutional democracy' (Buchanan, 1975B, p. 904). Rent-seeking When a tariff or monopoly raises the price and reduces the consumption of a commodity, economists have traditionally seen only the lost consumption of that commodity as an economic loss. In the US such losses have usually been less than 1 % of national consumption, so not very important. (We defer the question whether they should also be netted against any gains from tariff or monopoly.) In 'The welfare costs of tariffs, monopoly and theft' (1967), Gordon Tullock identified some other costs, especially the costs of seeking tariffs and monopolies. Many more firms and industries seek them than achieve them. The research, lobbying and other outlays of both the successful and die unsuccessful contenders consume resources but do not produce goods. Nor do government efforts to frustrate or regulate them, for example through anti-trust or consumer-protection activity. Tullock instanced the multiple social costs of theft. Successful and unsuccessful crooks equip themselves to burgle. Householders respond by buying screens and alarms and private security services. Government responds
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with police, courts and jails. These unproductive costs may greatly exceed the income transferred by burglary, and they divert resources from productive use. 'The total social cost of theft is the sum of the efforts invested in the activity of theft, private protection against theft, and the public investment in public protection' (Tullock, 1967, p. 231). Unproductive gain-seeking now has alternative names. Most economists call it 'directly unproductive profit-seeking', but one of themAnne Krueger, in 'The political economy of the rent-seeking society' (1974)gave it the name most public choice writers have since used, as they detect 'rent-seeking' in industrial and commercial regulation, the licensing of skilled occupations, tax and welfare and environmental policies, government investment and procurement, corporate chartering, competition for campaign funds and political ofBce, and the design of national constitutions. Tullock included the pursuit of monopoly by business means; most others look only for gains from relations with government. Robert Tollison, William Niskanen and others insist that unproductive gain-seeking explains all public activity and offers the only true general theory of government (Tollison, 1987, p. 155). Finding, estimating and thinking how to reduce unproductive gain-seeking is indeed a potentially valuable activity. But public choice principles of selection may hinder rather than help it, for a number of reasons. It is misleading to look only for gains from government. It is wrong to estimate the effects of tariff and monopoly, in all cases, by differentiation from an imagined alternative of perfect competition. Tariffs can yield welfare gains in at least the four cases identified by Adam Smith: in economies with structural unemployment or rising foreign debt; in industries with acquired rather than natural advantages and with high-scale thresholds. Some monopolies and oligopolies allow more productive long-term research and development than perfect competition would allow. Secure monopolies may save resources by deterring unsuccessful rentseeking by others. Government may sometimes do more good by price-controlling them than by 'trust-busting' them. Researchers and policy-makers should balance the estimated losses against the estimated gains from tariffs and monopolies, and the estimates should often be based as much on local knowledge as on axiomatic distrust of all tariffs, all monopoly and all government. Open-minded study of unproductive gain-seeking could valuably contribute to the theory of competition. Besides the effects of tariff and monopoly, there has been too little attention to other costs, especially micro-costs, of competition. There are economic costs of competitive advertising and marketing, of competitive tendering, of debt-financed competitive bidding for scarce city land, of over-capacity and the high failure rate of new firms. There can be economic as well as social costs of unduly competitive and insecure labour. Public and private firms, therefore, discriminate in many pragmatic ways between the efficient and the inefficient uses of competition. As they do so, profit-seeking and social efficiency sometimes conflict but often coincide. Some of the choices are of the unproductive rent-seeking kind, but in our experience most of them are not. Economists would give more perceptive and less doctrinaire policy advice if they studied the detailed reasons why able managers sometimes do and sometimes do not invite tenders, sometimes from selected tenderers and sometimes from all comers, choose to develop single, dual or multiple suppliers of the inputs they buy, offer some employees but not others uncompetitive job security, and so on. (There are examples in Stretton and Orchard, 1994, pp. 141-2; and in Stretton, 1995). Systematic methods of analysing the costs and benefits of many kinds of productive and unproductive competition could thus develop from Tullock's focus on the costs of unsuccessful competition
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for some kinds of unproductive gain. But to do that work successfully, public choice theorists would have to discard dieir distinctive principles of selectionas Downs and Tullock sometimes do, but most others do not. Applications Besides the continuing flow of theoretical writing about the main public choice themes, there is also empirical work which illustrates, tests and supports or confutes those themes by reference to particular political and other activities. With no room to review that work, we can merely suggest its range by listing some of its subjects. In the last five years Public Choice has printed articles about US Congressional, executive, state and local government behaviour; the Federal Reserve Board and the House Banking Committee; strategic arms limitation; human rights and the distribution of foreign aid; foreign expropriation of US investments; gun control, sugar, vehicle safety, child labour . and usury laws; pesticides, pollution and environmental regulation; state lotteries, drug policy, police bureaucracy; pricing in the nuclear power industry; AIDS-related insurance; cultural institutions and the art market; daylight saving; fire services, labour unions; and efforts to ban smoking in passenger aircraft and alcohol at college football games. Outside the United States there has been work on international differences in telephone rate structures; protective policies in Israel, New Zealand and the European Union; Italian broadcasting; Austrian public industries; agricultural price supports in Turkey; dual pricing in China; the Quebec Transport Commission; a Chilean presidential referendum; inflation in eight Latin American countries; Norwegian, Belgian and Flemish local government; candidate selection and voting behaviour in France; and a paper sweetly entitled 'Really sophisticated voting in French laboor elections'. Thus the range is wide; but we think too much of the analysis suffers from principles of selection criticised below in our discussion of public choice as political science. Prescriptions Public choice theorists distinguish their normative from their positive work. We presently argue that each is as value-structured as the other, but the normative writers offer more explicit policy advice. Three examples follow, from writers of the Chicago, Virginia and Indiana Schools, respectively. 1. Let the market rule Some Chicagoans see government as a market in which money and power are exchanged. They think the market is efficient: the prices tend to be right, the deals are to all the dealers' advantage, so the policies are as good as can be. Other schools of public choice are reluctant to believe government can be as good as that. Kennelly and Morrell (1991), for example, think the contending interests have such unequal bargaining strength that plenty of the deals, and therefore policies, are socially inefficient. 2. Constitutional democracy Leaders of the Virginia School dislike the kind of government that the Western democracies have developed, chiefly (critics say) because of its tendency to transfer wealth from, rather than to, the already rich. Lest our summary be unfair, let one of its own characterise the School:
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From the outset, Virginia scholars viewed their research as a scientific counter-balance to the onslaught by neoclassical economists targeted against capitalism. Throughout the period 1945 to 1962, Keynesian macroeconomists, Pigovian welfare economists and Musgraveian public finance scholars had led an unrelenting attack on the efficiency of markets and had mounted a major program of research exploring the appropriate responses by benevolent democratic governments . . . devising ever more exotic methods of government intervention. [But defenders of market efficiency] had no theory of government from which a scientific program could be launched. In a 'tour de force', Buchanan and Tullock (1962) provided the missing theory and put the advocates of market failure on the defensive. If externalities, public goods and information problems afflicted private markets, they ravaged a political market place that offered massive indivisibilities and only limited exit options to afflicted citizens. The scene was set for a program of scientific endeavour that exposed government failure coupled to a program of moral philosophy that supported constitutional reform designed to limit government, even to the role of the night watchman state. (Rowley, 1993, Vol. I, pp. xii-xiv)
That work began in 1949 when James Buchananthen at the University of. Chicagoargued in 'The pure theory of government finance: a suggested approach' that the theory and practice of public finance should be revised to relate the individual distribution of public costs to the individual distribution of public benefits, so diat people could see what each of them got in exchange for dieir taxes, and what government was doing to the whole pattern of inequalities. 'Ideally, the fiscal process represents a quid pro quo transaction . . . a market-type relationship exists between die individual and the government.' But how can government arrive at die pattern of taxation, services and odier policies which accords best widi its electors' individual preferences? In 1950 Kennedi Arrow showed diat it could not be done in any mechanical or logically coherent way. Rough justice has to happen by majority rule, on a dual basis of compatible material interests and shared ideas of justice and social purpose. Buchanan responded widi a different defence of majority rule. He agreed with Arrow, though for different reasons, that social values cannot logically be derived from individual values, and that public policy has to be made by majorities. But the coalitions which constitute the majorities keep changing, as excluded groups displace included groups by offering to support other members of the coalition at lower prices. Thus a sort of consensus may be achieved, bit by bit. (Much has since been written about the technicalities of voting systems. When economists write it, most public choice theorists call it social choice rather than public choice. When political scientists write it, it continues to be called political science. So it is omitted from this review.) Buchanan's later works offer different theories of majority rule for taxing income and for taxing wealdi. They are clearest in two books which he wrote widi Geoffrey
Brennan: The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (1980) and The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy (1985).
The first dieory builds on me familiar idea diat people who choose to live in a country promise implicidy to obey its laws. Brennan and Buchanan slide from 'obey' to 'support', so that minorities who vote against particular taxes are taken as consenting unanimously to those taxes. Thus, any majority is said to indicate unanimity, and die consent of defeated minorities can be assumed whatever die disparities of political or economic power, or die injustice of die arrangements which die majorities enforce (Brennan and Buchanan, 1985, pp. 102-3). That rule would allow majorities to plunder the rich and claim that die rich unanimously consented to the plunder. So a different
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rule is proposed for taxing capital. It relies on two original ideas: a new distinction between prospective and retrospective legislation, and a distinction between economic processes and their outcomes. Prospective legislation about processes is acceptable; retrospective legislation, and any legislation about outcomes, is not. Prospective legislation changes the rules under which people make their choices. If a law introduces an income tax, people who disagree with it can choose to stop earning or to emigrate. Those who choose to stay and earn can be taken as consenting to the tax even if they voted against it. Prospective laws adjust the rules under which the citizens make their choices. But consider: a collective decision to levy a tax on wealth. In this case, persons who have accumulated wealth have made prior choices under other rules. A change in fiscal rules of this sort violates all criteria of 'fairness' and could never lay claim to Pareto superiority . . . Changes in rules are prospective in their distributional implications whereas changes in observed distributions themselves are necessarily retrospective, with reference to the choice behaviour of the persons who an to generate the results. Changes in rules that can lay claim at all to consensual agreement can, at best, modify personal expectations about future distributional patterns. Rule changes cannot modify observed distributions as such . . . (Brennan and Buchanan, 1985, p. 138) That argument links the two distinctions. An income tax is said to affect the process of earning. A wealth tax affects the outcome of saving, i.e., the property acquired. It changes a distribution of wealth which has arisen from past choices. Owners did not expect this change of rule when they chose to accumulate their capital. Redistributing the capital now does not change the conditions in which people make their choices, it gives them no choice at all in the matter. And it offends the Pareto principle that only changes with no losers can be objectively identified as improvements. The authors claim that the distinction between process and outcome, the distinction between prospective and retrospective legislation, and the application of the Pareto rule to wealth but not to income are value-free analytical observations: they merely show which policies can reasonably claim unanimous support and which cannot. We disagree. In practice, many processes are outcomes, many outcomes are also processes, and which distributions you choose to describe as processes and which as outcomes depends chiefly on which of them you want to entrench. The distribution of income depends on past choices (of education, occupation, terms of employment, investment decisions, etc.), just as the distribution of wealth does. If the outcomes of past choices have constitutional protection, many more things than the distribution of wealth can claim protection, with changes subject to individual veto. Nor can either consistent uses of Pareto's concept of efficiency or these authors' inconsistent uses of it claim to be value-free. T o choose that criterion of efficiency is a moral choice. To do so for the purpose of avoiding moral judgements is another. To use it to argue for political unanimity and rights of veto is another it implies that it is socially efficient for slave-owners to veto the abolition of slavery, for the rich to veto any redistribution of their wealth, for swindlers to veto any strengthening of the laws against fraud, for a few of die employed to veto any income transfers to me unemployed. And the truth of the Paretian test is as doubtful as its morality. Paretians insist that changes which increase some incomes without reducing others are improvements which nobody need oppose. That conceals both the factual and the value judgement that an absolute
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loss of income does the loser harm but a proportionate loss does not. In practice, any increase in a society's total income poses divisive questions about its distribution. Gains for some but not for others can cause actual loss to the others. If workers' wages rise, for example, that raises prices against the rich. If the rich get richer, they bid up the price of limited resources (land, location, positional goods) against the poor. The Paretian principle is already value-based and factually misleading; to apply it where it protects the rich but not where it would protect anyone else is trebly prejudicial.
3. Communitarian self-interest
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, political scientists, are leaders of the Indiana School of public choice. In individual and joint works they attempt some difficult reconciliations. They work from public choice assumptions about rational egoismbut allow their egoists other interests besides economic ones. They are methodological individualists but insist on the force of culture and institutions in shaping individual wants and social codes and capacities. They see a need for coercive government for some purposesbut believe that people have considerable capacity for voluntary organisation and selfgovernment, cooperative in method and communitarian in spirit. But the reason for choosing that gentle cooperative activity is that it can do most for self-interested wants in the long run. It can also limit the need for more coercive and unresponsive government. The Ostroms have studied these possibilities in much empirical work on local government, contestability, competition, and local management of resources held in common. Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) explores the conditions in which small-scale cooperative action can and cannot succeed. She notices an effect of the academic longing for rigorous general models of behaviour: 'These models demonstrate what individuals will do when they are in a situation that they cannot change. We do not learn from these models what individuals will do when they have autonomy to craft their own institutions and can affect each other's norms and perceived benefits' (Ostrom, E., 1990, p. 184). On the one hand, the Ostroms' understanding of culture, institutions and cooperative possibilities might be more fruitful without the public choice axioms with which they keep trying to reconcile it. On the other hand, they are subtle questioners and critics of the axioms, and of the belief that individual self-interest necessarily weakens the traditional solidarities of small-town America. That sympathetic persuasion may induce more second thoughts in the public choice ranks than hostile critics are likely to do. Public choice as political science Before considering particular areas of work it is worth noticing some general scientific claims that are often made for public choice theory: claims to originality, to objectivity, and for the use of axiomatic theory for purposes of historical explanation. All three are related to the principles of selection which shape most public choice work. The claims to originality are based on true accounts of public choice theory, but grossly false accounts of the traditional political theory which it offers to replace. That traditional theory is said to ignore the play of private interests in politics. In fact, relations between individual, group, class, religious and national interests, between material and other interests, between selfish, disinterested and generous interests,
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between the interests of governors and governed, and between conflicting codes of behaviour and conflictingoften self-interestedideas of individual and social good have been the central subjects of political theory since Plato. They have attracted investigative research by generations of American radicals and muckrakers. Public choice writing is original only to the extent that it denies the force of any disinterested concern for public interests or good government. Most claims to value-freedom in social science are necessarily false, for reasons argued long ago by Gunnar Myrdal, Paul Streeten, and others. For public choice readers, a reminder of some of those reasons may be helpful. First, the facts of political life are unevenly knowable. Some are physically measurable. Some are mental: beliefs, values, purposes. Some are institutional: laws, organisations, customs. Such diverse facts cannot all be known by the same methods or with the same certainty. But choices of method affect the selection of data, often with political effects, intended or unintended. (An example is the refusal to attempt interpersonal comparisons of utility.) Causal relations have similar diversity. Some are observable processes. Some can only be inferred, uncertainly, from associations. Some have to be understood in people's feelings and reasoning: how and why they decide to respond to what they encounter. Not many political hypotheses can be tested by controlled experiment ceteris paribus, and where they can it is not always easy to know how stable the cetera are. Complex interdependence between some stable and some changing forces means that the conclusions of causal analysis must often depend on the investigator's choice of counterfactuals (which we call imagined alternatives); and the uncertainties make it easy for investigators to imagine, and defend, alternatives which accord with their social purposes. There are linear and lateral (or diachronic and synchronic) causal relations. Chains of cause and effect converge and interact through time to produce present effects, and narrative explanations have to decide how far into the past to trace which of the chains. Present effects also depend on innumerable present conditions, and analysts have to decide which of those relations to specify, leaving the rest to sleep unnoticed among the
ceteras.
Causes which contribute to one effect also contribute to other effects. (A policy which allows full employment may also inflate wages.) Investigators may have such byproducts in mind in deciding which necessary conditions of a particular effect to include in their causal explanations of that effect. Coping with these complexities, social analysis has to be shaped partly by its social purposes. Truth and the increase of knowledge are necessary but not sufficient principles of selection. What you need to know depends on what you want to do with the knowledge. Even the most uninterfering curiosity has to distinguish interesting from uninteresting questions, and satisfying kinds of explanation from true-but-trivial ones. Scholars with more active purposes may search die causal web for reasons against, or opportunities for, collective action, and for action with welcome rather than unwelcome by-products. All such analytical choices need to be shaped by both technical and valuing considerations. Different choices often reveal different possibilities of action, different constraints, different warnings. No single analysis of a complex modem economy can expose all its causal relations and potentialities. In its usual meaning of value-freedom, there is no such thing as 'positive' social science. There can be objective facts but there can be no unselective causal analysis.
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Economists nevertheless continue to contrast positive with normative science. Those who want to appear positive have to use principles of selection which conceal or appear to be irrelevant to their social values. Ironically, that often damages the technical quality of the work. Some select for certainty, hoping that analysis confined to the objectively measurable strands of the causal complexity will yield hard, causal knowledge. Some select only regular elements of the complexity, hoping thus to theorise regularities of economic performance. Marshall and Keynes rightly condemned both principles: the regulars' effects are so often disturbed by the irregulars that useful analysis usually has to include some of both. A common mistake of that kind contrasts science as nomothetic and theoretical, with history as ideographic, offering only selective, ad hoc explanations of its subject matter. Historical explanations are indeed selective. The mistake is to suppose that theoretical explanations of complex, partly irregular interrelations can be any less selective. Public choice theory constrains its users to look only for proximate, individually selfish, and preferably few and regular causes of the phenomena they want to explain. Historians, political scientists, political economists and shrewd politicians are freer to search the web with open eyes and minds, looking for the causal relations they need to know for the purposes they have in mind. Gordon Tullock has recently complained that public choice theory cannot explain the stable size of government before 1945. William Niskanen complains that it cannot explain 'the major political developments of our lifetime: the massive expansion of government budgets and regulation, the erosion of the economic constitution, and the progressive spread and recent collapse of communism' (Niskanen, 1993, p. 151). But no axiomatic monocausal theory can answer such questionsthey are historical questions which call for historical explanations, shaped by whatever is the purpose of asking them. Selection also varies for other reasons. Scholars try to be original. Disciplines specialise in different aspects of social interdependence. There are also true-or-false disagreements about particular facts or causal relations. To summarise: however true their facts and logical their reasoning, students of politics have to bring value-based purposes as well as technical considerations of truth and relevance to bear in three irreducible tasks of selection. They must choose what questions to ask; what areas of the relevant causal history and interdependence to explore; and what alternatives to imagine when estimating the effects of the forces they choose to study. Different selective principles shape the detail of different branches of public choice work. But in a general waywith individual variants and exceptionsthe theorists and empirical investigators tend to selea for study political activities which they believe do economic harm. The harm is defined, as market failure is, by differentiation from the perfectly competitive, allocatively efficient, self-equilibrating, fully employed economy of neoclassical imagination. To explain why the harmful activities occur, causal analysts tend to select the self-interests at work, both in individual motivation and in the mixed composition of majorities and organisations, and depict them, often falsely, as the sufficient causes of the public activity, and the effects ascribed to it. Others, especially from the Rochester School of public choice, focus on the institutional forms which determine the scope for that motivation. Focusing on the self-interests is compounded by the practice, very common in public choice writing, of treating any necessary condition or selected set of necessary conditions as a sufficient cause. When individuals act from mixed motives, theorists of the
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homo economicus school tend to report the selfish elements of the mix as the sufficient causes of action. When a majority is composed of some selfish, some disinterested and some self-sacrificing groups (as are most majorities for progressive taxation, welfare benefits or aids to particular industries), the selfish groups are treated as sufficiently causing the outcome. And so on. Some public choice scholars claim William of Occam's authority for this trick. Assessment and self-assessment There has been both celebration and self-criticism during the last five years as the founders of the public choice movement come to retire. There is room for only the briefest sketch of some main lines of external and internal assessment of the achievement. The assumption of exclusively rational, egoistic, materially acquisitive behaviour is now acknowledged to be unhelpful and to generate inaccurate predictions and false or inadequate explanations of political performance. This is asserted by public choice theorists (for example, Downs, 1962; Brennan and Buchanan, 1985, p. 51, 1988, p. 180; Buchanan, 1993, pp. 67-8, 73; Mueller, 1986, 1989, pp. 271, 456-7; van der Kragt, Dawes and Orbell, 1988; North, 1993; Niskanen, 1993, p. 151), as well as by critics of other persuasions (for example, Arrow, 1967, 1972, 1973; Sen, 1977; Lewin, 1991; and, magisterially, Self, 1993). Nevertheless, the assumption still operates as a principle of selection in much empirical work, as described above. Where it is plainly false, some rescue it by defining all behaviour, including the most self-sacrificing, as equally selfish because it must be presumed to yield 'psychic income'. Some theorists of politics as exchange make a more sophisticated mistake. Members of society contribute to its functioning in various ways, andreceivevarious benefits from it. Objectively there is, thus, directly and indirectly, an exchange of social goods. Without evidence of the people's states of mind it is a logical slide to conclude that the individuals who contribute are motivated exclusively by desire for benefits for themselves and nobody else. But some theorists do conclude that, and, if faced with contrary evidence, argue that any generous or dutiful behaviour merely results from 'internalising* the terms of exchange, leaving the behaviour as exclusively self-interested as ever. The insistent identification of 'rational' with 'selfish' cannot help recommending selfish behaviour as rational and other behaviour as irrational. Frank, Gilovich and Regan (1993) are not the first investigators to find that economics students are less cooperative and more selfish than others, not because more selfish people choose to study economics but because the study makes them more selfish. Public choice teachers are the most insistent sowers of the seed. Our own experience in teaching and government is that it does noticeable harm to many students' cooperative spirit and social understanding, and to the public policies which they go on to influence. Some forms of methodological individualism also have selective effects. Most public choice theorists, like many liberals, interest themselves in relations between fully formed adults, without much attention to the conditions and experience that form them. Rules appropriate for suitably socialised adults can alter the socialisation of their successors, and perhaps the consequent working and value of those rulesbut public choice theorists are rarely alert for such effects. (It is because conservatives are least likely to make that mistake, or to regard self-enrichment as the only rational use of a human life, that we are reluctant to call public choice theory conservative. Its influence
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tends to corrode rather than conserve inherited values and habits of cooperative or dutiful behaviour.) Research has also discredited the main branches of public choice micro-theory. Public enterprise is not regularly less efficient than private (Borcherding, Pommerehne and Schneider, 1982; Millward, 1982; Stretton and Orchard, 1994, pp. 80-122). Public regulation does not regularly reduce private efficiency (Hahn, 1990). A great many investigators have found that people vote, although rational actors would not; vote for other reasons besides material self-interest; and quite often vote against their material interests. Despite these troubles, the movement flourishes. In 1991 a new editor claimed that Public Choice 'had played an indispensable role in stimulating a research program which has succeeded in revolutionizing the approach both of economics and of political science to the behaviour of political markets.' (Rowley, 1991, p. 201) The founders are not all as self-confident as Rowley. In 1993 an issue of PubHc Choice printed 22 papers on 'The next twenty-five years of public choice'. Many of them are more rueful than triumphant. Buchanan wonders whether it is time to move 'beyond die relatively narrow behavioural limits that seem to be imposed by the economic model of behaviour? Should we begin to examine the effects of other motivational postulates on political outcomes?' He concedes that there are public interests, and public-spirited people in government, and suggests structural changes which might improve their chances against the interest groups who at present defeat them. North calls for 'a critical exploration of the behavioural assumptions [which public choice] employs . . . Why do we hang on to a postulate that prevents us from coming to grips with the overwhelming problems that will remain unsoluble as long as we maintain the blinders of the instrumental rationality assumption?' In a sophisticated attack on simplistic thinking, Vincent Ostrom argues that 'concepts of "States" and "Markets" are not effective ways of articulating the intellectual revolution that is stirring in our midst . . . they are too gross to be useful and run the risk of being misleading and dangerous.' To Niskanen, 'the simple models of early public choice now seem to be romantic rationalizations of early democratic theory. Much of the subsequent literature is a collection of intellectual games. Our specialty has developed clever models that predict the signs of first and second derivatives but cannot answer such single questions as "Why do people vote?" . . . Public choice has now become a recognized field of academic study. It is not clear, however, that we have much of interest to tell the world.' Mueller, finally, thinks the best course for public choice would be to rejoin the traditional disciplinesbut, sadly, does not expect it to do so. 'There is much rational actor modellers could learn from the other social sciences in terms of die motivation of individuals and the institutional constraints in which they operate . . . More accurate predictions are possible if we build our models on a richer behavioural base.' But he fears mat economists' arrogant unrealism will prevail, and diat most of his colleagues 'will continue to mine the intensive margin of ever more refined model-building on a narrow behavioural foundation, rather than shift out to the extensive margin where economics, rational politics, sociology and psychology come together. I hope I am wrong.' (All quotations in diis section are from die named authors' papers in Public Choice, vol. 77, no. 1, 1993.)
Prospects
For a decade or two after 1945, Talcott Parsons' grand dieory prevailed in US schools of sociologydien abruptly most of diem discarded it. David Easton's proposal to
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transform political science into systems theory had a shorter summer and quicker burial. Some critics think that public choice theory should likewise be consigned to the archives as an interesting aberration. But its fit with the deregulating, privatising, tax-hating temper of the times makes that unlikely. How might it become a more intellectually respectable aid to the forces and values of the Right? Two possibilities seem to us to have most promise. One would develop the public choice community as the pathologists of a particular range of diseases of government, in the honourable tradition of the utilitarian, the philosophical radical, the humanitarian, the free traders', the Marxian, the muckraking, the libertarian and other specialised critics of government. What Ralph Nader does for consumers, public choice might do for capital owners, taxpayers, and others. It might be objected that pathologists need a concept of good health but public choice has no concept of good government. But, first, they are entitled to represent the view that government is a necessary evil to be minimised. And, second, not all public choice scholars are so negative. In the work of Downs, Tullock, Olson, the Ostroms and others, and in many case studies of particular institutions and policies, there are passages of acute observation, detective work, and pragmatic rather than axiomatic criticism of government. There are even signs in the papers on the next 25 years that the libertarian intent of some practitioners may be encountering genuinely conservative concerns in others. A scholarly journal of public policy which invited debate between the libertarian, the capital-owning, the moral, and the socially conservative divisions of the Rightwith space also for radical muckrakers of bad governmentmight be valuable indeed. There is no necessary conflict between that project and Mueller's proposal that public choice rejoin the traditional disciplines. To do that it need only discard its narrow behavioural assumptions and use, instrumentally, whatever elements of economic, political, sociological, psychological or other theory will illuminate the problems its scholars select for study. That may pose two difficulties. First, divisions of labour and skill must limit any scholar's range, and the academic boundaries of the disciplines often compound the difficulties. Second, we think (without knowing whether he does) that the constraints which Mueller asks his colleagues to discard are precisely the distinguishing characteristics of public choice theory. But, if his invitation sidesteps any need for U-turns or confessions of failure, and points humanely to a forward rather than a backward route to rejoin the mainstream of social science, so much the better.
Bibliography
Because public choice theorists may welcome a guide to external criticism of their work, the bibliography is divided. Public choice writing is followed by a list of critical writing by others. Some papers are hard to classify, so to find a reference it may sometimes be necessary to look in two places. Readers wanting comprehensive reviews or anthologies of the field may read Dennis C. Mueller, Public Choice II (1989) or, for a more critical review, Peter Self, Government by the Market? The Politics of Public Choice (1993). Seventy-four papers chosen by an editor of Public Choice to represent both the best public-choice work and its range of matter and method are reprinted in the three volumes of Charles K. Rowley (ed.) Public Choice Theory (1993). Volume 77, No. 1 (1993) of Public Choice prints 22 papers on 'The next twenty-five years of public choice'.
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Public choice Becker, G. S. 1983. A theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 98, 371-400 Bergsten, G. 1985. On the role of social norms in a market economy, Public Choice, vol. 45, 113-37 Brennan, G. 1987. The Buchanan contribution, Finanz Archiv, vol. 45, 1-24 Brennan, G. 1989. Politics with romance: towards a theory of democratic socialism, in Hamlin, A. and Pettit, P. (eds), The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, Oxford, Basil Blackwell Brennan, G. and Buchanan, J. M. 1980. The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Brennan, G. and Buchanan, J. M. 1981. The normative purpose of economic science: rediscovery of an eighteenth-century method, International Review of Law and Economics, vol. 1, 155-66 Brennan, G. and Buchanan, J. M. 1985. The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Brennan, G. and Buchanan, J. M. 1988. Is public choice immoral? The case for the rNobel> lie, Virginia Law Review, vol. 74, 179-89 Brennan, G. and Pincus, J. 1987. Rational actor theory in politics: a critical review of John Quiggin, Economic Record, vol. 63, 22-32 Buchanan, J. M. 1949. The pure theory of government finance: a suggested approach, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 57, 496-506 Buchanan, J. M. 1960. Fiscal Theory and Political Economy: Selected Essays, Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press Buchanan, J. M. 1967. Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press Buchanan, J. M. 1968. Demand and Supply of Public Goods, Chicago, Rand McNally Buchanan, J. M. 1975 A. The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan, Chicago, Chicago University Press Buchanan, J. M. 1975B. Comment, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 18, 902-A Buchanan, J. M. 1977. Why does government grow? in Borcherding, T. (ed.), Budgets and Bureaucrats: The Sources of Government Growth, Durham NC, Duke University Press Buchanan, J. M. 1979. Politics without romance: a sketch of positive public choice theory and its normative implications. Reprinted in Buchanan, J. M. and Tollison, R. (eds) (1984), The Theory of Public Choice II, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press Buchanan, J. M. 1987. Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy, College Station, Texas A&M University Press Buchanan, J. M. 1989A. Explorations into Constitutional Economics, College Station, Texas A&M University Press Buchanan, J. M. 1989B. The state of economic science, in Sichel, W. (ed.), The State of Economic Science, Kalamazoo MI, W. E. Upjohn Institute Buchanan, J. M. 1993. Public choice after socialism, Public Choice, vol. 77, 67-74 Buchanan, J. M. and Samuels W. 1975. On some fundamental issues in political economy: an exchange of correspondence, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 9, 15-38 Buchanan, J. M., Tollison, R. and Tullock, G. (eds) 1980. Towards a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, College Station, Texas A&M University Press Buchanan, J. M. and Tullock, G. 1962. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press Buchanan, J. M. and Wagner, R. E. 1977. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, New York, Academic Press Colander, D. C. (ed.) 1984. Neoclassical Political Economy: The Analysis of Rent-Seeking and DUP Activities, Cambridge MA, Ballinger Publishing Downs, A. 195 7 A. An economic theory of political action in a democracy, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 65, 135-50 Downs, A. 1957B. An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, Harper & Row Downs, A. 1960. Why the government budget is too small in a democracy, World Politics, vol. 12, 541-63 Downs, A. 1961. In defence of majority voting, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 69, 192-9 Downs, A. 1962. The public interest: its meaning in a democracy, Social Research, vol. 29, 1-36 Downs, A. 1967. Inside Bureaucracy, Boston, little Brown
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Cambridge Journal of Economics 1997, 21, 409-430

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

L. Orchard and H. Stretton

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