Best case, worst case, and the golden mean in political economy: An introduction to a symposium on Tim Besley’s principled agents? The political economy of good government

Abstract

Tim Besley’s Principled Agents is a conceptually challenging work to both traditional welfare economics and the public choice approach identified with James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Besley’s argumentative strategy is to first admit the cogency of the public choice critique of market failure theory and traditional welfare economics and then to argue that the public choice critique goes too far in its pessimism. Instead, Besley argues that based on knowledge from public choice theory, institutional selection mechanisms can be designed in politics to select for both politician motivation and for politician competence. With such a mechanism in place, good government can result. Besley’s book has great strengths and is recommended to all modern students of political economy. One of the great strengths is Besley’s deep affinity for the work of James Buchanan in public finance and public choice. In this sense, Besley’s work is an immanent critique of public choice, and a construction of a golden mean type argument in political economy against the naive best case theorizing of Samuelsonian welfare economics, and the overly pessimistic worst case theorizing of Buchanan and Tullock. We have assembled a group of leading public choice scholars to respond to Besley’s challenging book. The responses all reflect a different slice of the argument on why the selection mechanism in politics might not work to produce the motivational and competence characteristics desired in politicians to get “good government.” Robert Tollison discusses the merits of the principal or agent framework that Besley deploys for future research in public choice. Geoffrey Brennan discusses the important qualification to the Hume dictum that in modeling