Neoclassical politics: public choice and political understanding

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Abstract
This paper's central concern is to assess the cogency of the public-choice perspective on politics. The paper is in three main parts. In the first part, I sketch out the market failure-benevolent government tradition within public sector economics; a tradition which came to give the state a major role in economic affairs. In the second part, I set down the essential principles of public choice theory. This section of the paper is sharply critical of the market failure benevolent government tradition and is concerned to apply the model of individual behaviour and the method of science integral to neoclassical economics to the material of politics, pointing to the importance of political failure by essentially selfish governments. In the third part, I identify four aspects of the public-choice perspective that I see as problematic in enabling us to advance a good understanding of politics. First, I deal with the testing of public-choice predictions; secondly, I explore the conception of explanation caught up in public choice work; thirdly, I question the utility of public-choice assumptions; and fourthly, I attend to the implications of the values that seem to be central to the perspective of public-choice theorists. In a concluding section I point to the need for concrete research and open debate, I suggest that students of politics need to focus on the state and argue that we can best advance understanding of particular states by attending to the significance of constitutions and looking to the insights provided by constitutional theory. We should try to devise a theory of individual behavior in the political process, and then we should try to check out the implications of the theory against the facts. J.M. Buchanan,What should economists do?Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979: 148. (Buchanan, 1979: 148). …there is something desperately wrong and conceptually confused in the relentless attempt to force the description and explanation of human action into the grid of empirical natural science. (Bernstein, 1979: xvi)

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