The critique of public choice
Within economics departments, the use of deductive models grounded upon the assumption of self-interested behaviour is now largely unchallenged (Lawson 1997). Undergraduates taking economics degrees are simply no longer exposed to methodological alternatives.
In the 1980s practitioners confidently predicted that public choice would soon acquire a similar status within political science (Mueller 1993). This does not now seem particularly likely. Public choice will continue to attract support and provide a trenchant alternative to pluralist and other theories of the state. But it seems no more likely than any of these other theories to completely dominate political science. Indeed, far from becoming an unquestioned orthodoxy, public choice has if anything recently attracted growing criticism. Much of this continues, perhaps inevitably, to focus upon the assumption of self-interested behaviour (Mansbridge 1990; Paul etal. 1997). One standard argument here runs as follows. In deciding how to act people are usually guided by norms telling them how they ought to behave (Elster 1989). The existence and motivational force of such norms does not mean that people are always and everywhere cuddly altruists. For in many cases norms support and encourage self-interested behaviour. Entrepreneurs negotiating contracts with their suppliers are not considered to have done anything socially reprehensible if they drive a hard bargain in their attempt to maximize profits. But in every society norms proscribe self-interested behaviour in, for example, dealings with friends, family and the elderly and infirm.How does this relate to the theory of the state? In many countries a set of norms best described as constituting a ‘public service ethos’ require politicians, bureaucrats and others working for the state to be guided in their decisionmaking by considerations of the public interest and to avoid using their positions to further their self-interest.
Of course such norms are not always adhered to. In the 1990s, to take just one example, a number of Conservative MPs in the UK started to ask parliamentary questions in return for cash payments (Leigh and Vulliamy 1997). But this does not mean that public service norms do not exist. Indeed the efforts of these MPs to conceal the real motives for their behaviour and the force of the scandal which eventually broke over them in some ways confirm their existence. At one level the existence of such norms poses no explanatory problem for public choice. Because once a norm has been established, it will often be in a person’s self-interest to adhere to it. In this way public choice theorists can argue that it is politicians’ self-interest which leads them to be guided by considerations of the public interest. But this is precisely what public choice theorists do not argue. Instead, and as we have seen, they set about trying to debunk the ‘romantic’ (Buchanan 1984) myth that those working for the state are guided by considerations of the public interest.This critique of the assumption of self-interested behaviour has one further and important element to it. Practitioners routinely describe public choice as offering a ‘scientific’ approach to the study of politics (Lustick 1997). It is not difficult to see why. Because the natural sciences carry a great deal of explanatory authority, the scientific label is one worth investing in. But one way in which social sciences like politics differ from natural sciences like physics is in terms of the differences their arguments and explanations make to the world. Theories about black holes do not and obviously cannot change the behaviour of black holes. Theories about why, for example, states concede independence to their central banks can make a difference to political behaviour and outcomes. Indeed over the last few decades the argument that financial markets reward countries that have independent banks with lower interest rates has become one of the key arguments wielded by those favouring independence (Bell 2004).
One possible lesson to draw from this ‘reflexivity’ is that the social sciences ought to be selfconsciously ‘critical’. They ought not simply to try and explain the world but change it.In many ways this is of course precisely what public choice theorists have done. Public choice has modified the way ‘modern man views government’ (Buchanan 1984: 21). In America, the critique of Keynesianism has fuelled demands for legislation requiring governments to pass balanced budgets whilst rent-seeking has been used to justify demands for reforms to campaign finance law. In Britain and America, Niskanen’s theory of the budget-maximizing bureaucrat has encouraged the development of internal competitive tendering and privatization (Dowding 1995: 63-78). Yet from a self-consciously critical perspective, the problem with public choice is that the assumption of self-interest legitimates and promotes such behaviour in the ‘real world’. It does so by making purely self-interested actions seem a perfectly normal, unobjectionable and unavoidable part of our nature (Stephens 1991). So whilst self-interested behaviour may once have been a very inaccurate assumption to make about the behaviour of most people, the academic success of public choice theory may have contributed to making it more truthful. Public choice theorists may, in other words, have recreated the world in their own, rather unattractive, image. Given their motivational starting-point, public choice theorists see their normative task as being one of ‘constructing a political order that will channel the selfserving behaviour of participants toward the common good’ (Buchanan and Wagner 1978: 18). The possibility that maximizing the common good requires public spiritedness and that the role of the social sciences is to say so loudly and clearly simply passes public choice theorists by.
More on the topic The critique of public choice:
- Public choice
- Public choice without prejudice
- Chapter 4 Public Choice
- Public choice, market failure and state failure
- Critique of our critique of the deontic (or prescriptivist) conception
- Rational choice institutionalism
- Bourdieu’s ‘Post-structuralist’ Critique
- Anderson Matthew (ed.). Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities. JAI Press,2005. — 168 p., 2005
- Diocletian and the Efficacy of Public Law
- Chapter 12 Public/Private: The Boundaries of the State
- 5.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR DOMESTIC PUBLIC LAW AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
- There appears to be a veritable industry of academic work on globalization, which reflects, in turn, the way in which this term has entered into common currency in the media and even in public discourse.
- The language of public debate on international issues is filled with appeals to and invocations of the international community.1
- In the Roman legal system, all private and public legal disputes were initiÂated by individuals against other individuals, all of whom became litigants once the matter was brought before the magistrate.