Reply to Blankart and Koester's Political Economics versus Public Choice Two Views of Political Economy in Competition

Abstract

In an article in this issue of Kyklos, Charles Blankart and Gerrit Koester discuss public choice and political economics as two separate and competing research paradigms. We do not agree with this premise: public choice and political economics are not in competition. To us, public choice and political economics are more labels than competing paradigms, and the research under these labels study similar problems with similar approaches. A major difference is that public choice started much earlier on, when the analytical methods of economics were different and, many would say, less advanced. Political economics largely continues the tradition of public choice, taking advantage of the progress achieved by economics over the last 25 years in the precision of theoretical modeling and empirical inference. Blankart and Koester also claim that we do not give credit where credit is due, and that we overlooked earlier research on representative democracy by scholars such as Downs, Tullock, Riker, Ordeshook and others. We strongly reject this claim, and we wonder whether Blankart and Koester ever closely looked at the book on political economics by Persson and Tabellini (2000). Chapters 2 and 3 of that book are almost entirely devoted to reviewing early contributions on representative democracy. On p. 5 of their paper, Blankart and Koester quote three lines from the preface to Persson and Tabellini (2000). But these lines are written by Christian Schultz, and not by us. Our own description of the roots of political economics, and – specifically – its relation to public choice, in Chapter 1 of the same book (pp. 2–4), reads as follows: