Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice : Economic Explanations in Political Science

In the last twenty years more and more social scientists have begun using concepts and methods derived from economics to explain political phe nomena. A new field of research has grown up which attempts to model collective decision-making in liberal democracies much as conventional economists analyze consumers' and firms' behaviour in private markets. This approach is variously known as 'political economy' (because it straddles the disciplines of economics and political science); 'public choice theory' (because it focuses on public or collective choices as opposed to the private choices of individuals analyzed by conventional micro-economics); or 'rational choice theory' (because it develops from the assumption that people are rational actors). There is a basic cleavage within public choice between the more abstract modelling work which I term the first principles' literature, and the more applied work which I term 'institutional public choice'.