Are Public Choice Scholars Different?

Abstract

I his classic text, Dennis Mueller (1989, 1) defines public choice analysis as “the economic study of nonmarket decision making, or simply the application of economics to political science. . . . The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer.” By its very nature, this interdisciplinary field of study was, at its start in the late 1950s and early 1960s, outside the mainstream of both economics and politics. Many economists were, at the time, wary of applying economic models where there were not formal markets and price mechanisms to govern relationships, while political scientists were skeptical of rationality assumptions and formal modeling techniques inherent in economic study. Today, however, economists seem quite comfortable with applying economic models to almost any worldly phenomena, and many introductory economics textbooks include a chapter specifically on public choice issues. Public choice inroads into the mainstream of political science have been slower. Critics of the public choice paradigm are vocal, attacking its assumptions, its conclusions, and its impact, but are unable to fully account for its influence. Orchard and Stretton (1997), for example, argue that public choice analysis has been ideologically driven and dominated by the libertarian perspective. They contend that its “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” (423) and that “research has also discredited the main branches of public choice micro-theory” (424). Yet, “despite these troubles, the movement flourishes” (424), perhaps because of the “deregulating, privatizing, tax-hating temper of the times” (425). Cohn (1999) notes that critics refer to rational choice as a “cult.” At this juncture, it appears fruitful to consider the overall status of public choice analysis in the social sciences. In this note, we seek to discover if public choice scholars truly differ in their methodological beliefs and conclusions from other economists and political scientists. Have their assumptions and conclusions been rejected or accepted? As a first grasp at tackling this issue, we circulated a survey containing 33 statements regarding various public choice model assumptions or predictions regarding the interplay of politics and economics. The survey was sent to 200 randomly selected members of the American Economic Association (AEA) and 207 randomly selected members of the American Political Science Association (APSA), as well as to almost everyone on the Public Choice Society (PCS) mailing list, which includes 201 economists and 125 political scientists.