Public choice without prejudice

The debate between the proponents and opponents of public choice has tended to polarize political science opinion. In this final section I want to show how the basic terms of this increasingly contentious debate might nevertheless be changed.

As two public choice theorists, Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky (1993), have however recognized, the analogy between market and electoral decision-making is that, in one crucial respect, misleading. In a market environment consumers are decisive over their choices. When a utility­maximizing consumer who prefers apples to oranges chooses oranges they get oranges. Voters are in a very different position. In anything other than the smallest of electorates, the chances of any one individual’s vote making any difference to the outcome of an election are miniscule. A voter may want candidate X and may choose X in the polling booth but nevertheless get Y. The inference public choice theorists have traditionally drawn from this is that it is irrational to vote (Downs 1957: 265-70; Riker and Ordeshook 1968). Even if measured solely in terms of the shoe leather expended whilst walking to the polling booth, the costs of voting will always be greater than the benefits of voting discounted by the probability of being decisive. For this reason, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizing individuals should not vote.

There is a link to be drawn here with the earlier argument. For one form expressive voting might take is the extension of support to politicians who, in their words and deeds, have committed themselves to the pursuit of the public interest and, conversely, the withdrawal of support from those believed to have, for example, manipulated the economy or sold policy favours for their own gain. In so far as voters are prepared to express themselves in this way, self-interested politicians intent upon achieving their re-election will have an incentive to commit themselves to the pursuit of the public interest. There is nothing new here. I have already suggested that the existence of norms gives people a self-interested reason to abide by those norms. For public choice theory the implications are nevertheless stark. Public choice theorists want to argue that there is no real difference between the market and the state. Both are prone to efficiency failures. Both are populated by self-interested actors. Both are prone to problems caused by monopolies, externalities and public goods. Yet if Brennan and Lomasky are right, there is an enduring and important difference between the market and the state. Actors in the former have stronger incentives to act in self-interested way and for this reason it cannot necessarily be assumed that markets and the state will always fail for the same reasons and in the same way. Public choice involves the application of the methods of economics to the study of politics and, in particular, the assumption of self-interested behaviour. The extension of this assumption to the political arena may however be totally inappropriate.

How might ‘traditionalist’ public choice theorists react to this argument? If we accept the basic logic of the argument about expressive voting, public choice theorists might nevertheless say that all that has been established is the incentive self-interested politicians have to provide a public interest ‘cover’ for their actions (see Tullock 1990).

The need to provide a public interest ‘cover’ does nevertheless make a difference. Politics is not simply about the expression of self-interest. It is also about argument and persuasion. In pursuing their self-interest, politicians and other state actors must try and persuade sceptical voters, journalists and opponents that their actions are consistent with the public interest. It is not difficult to imagine the basic terms of an alternative research agenda in which this interaction between self-interest and the public interest is brought to the explanatory fore (Hindmoor 2004). The methodological victim in such an approach would not be the assumption of self-interest upon which so much attention has been lavished in this chapter. It would instead by the attempt to provide ‘top-down’, deductive, explanations. Conceptions of what the public interest consists of vary from country to country and from period to period. The rhetorical efforts of politicians and other state actors to persuade their audiences of the public interest justification for their actions will therefore be similarly varied. Whilst we might, at the most general of levels, say that politicians’ and other actors will seek to provide a public interest ‘cover’ for their actions we cannot say what form this cover will take. We cannot, that is, construct ‘top-down’, all-purpose general explanations of actors’ behaviour.