10 Facts About Public choice

Public choice theory is closely related to social choice theory, a mathematical approach to aggregation of individual interests, welfares, or votes.

Public choice, building upon economic theory, has some core tenets that are largely adhered to.

An early precursor of modern public choice theory was the work of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, which treated government as political exchange, a quid pro quo, in formulating a benefit principle linking taxes and expenditures.

In contrast, public choice theory modeled government as made up of officials who, besides pursuing the public interest, might act to benefit themselves, for example in the budget-maximizing model of bureaucracy, possibly at the cost of efficiency.

One way to organize the subject matter studied by public choice theorists is to begin with the foundations of the state itself.

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Public choice theory is often used to explain how political decision-making results in outcomes that conflict with the preferences of the general public.

Public choice's views capped what has come to be known as the Chicago school of political economy and it has come in sharp conflict with the so-called Virginia faction of public choice due to the former's assertion that politics will tend towards efficiency due to nonlinear deadweight losses and due to its claim that political efficiency renders policy advice irrelevant.

Several notable public choice scholars have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, including Kenneth Arrow, James M Buchanan, George Stigler, Gary Becker, Amartya Sen, Vernon Smith and Elinor Ostrom.

Further, Steven Pressman offers a critique of the public choice approach, arguing that public choice actually fails to explain political behavior in a number of central areas including politicians' behavior as well as voting behavior.

Pressman is not alone in his critique, other prominent public choice economists recognize that theorizing voting behavior is a major issue for the public choice approach.