Discussion of the literature on government behavior

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to contribute to the growing literature which aims at developing positive models of government behavior. As was already indicated in Chapter 1, in this context, the most important approach in political economics, rooted in neoclassical microeconomics, is public choice. Public choice can be defined as the economic study of nonmarket decisionmaking, or simply the application of economics to political science. The subject matter of public choice is the same as that of political science: the theory of the state, voting rules, voter behavior, party politics, the bureaucracy, and so on. The methodology of public choice is that of economics, however. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that “man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer” (Mueller(1979, p.1)).