Items related to Public Choice: An Introduction
Synopsis
This book offers students of politics and sociology a non-technical explanation of public choice in theory and practice, examining its intellectual roots in games theory, cooperation and collective choice. As groups of people will not always voluntarily cooperate to achieve valued goals, some form of government is necessary to provide such benefits as defence or clean air. But the provision of government is itself a public good. McLean considers the roles and actions of those who shape governments' choices to furnish the goods - entrepreneurs, lobbyists, bureaucrats, political coalitions and interest groups - as well as the importance of the voters and consumers who keep governments in power.
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From the Back Cover
The 1968 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to one of the founders of public choice theory, James Buchanan, yet many people have only the vaguest idea what public choice is. The book offers and unusually clear and accessible introduction to an important subject. McLean examines the workings of public choice from two related perspectives – collective action and the aggregation of individual preferences into social consensus.
The book highlights the paradox at the heart of collective action– that self–interest in the public domain is frequently counterproductive. National defense and clean air are things we all benefit from – they are public goods – but we tend to resist contributing to them. The first part of this book examines how government choice in such areas is shaped, and by whom– political entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, interest groups and ordinary citizens. McLean uses the idea of a public market in which politicians sell what they hope voters will buy, and further considers how and when people (and animals) co–operate to produce public goods even without government coercion. In the second part of the book the author examines the consequences of combining individual preferences, arguing that there is no straightforward way of adding them up to form a ′social ordering′ and assesing the implications of this both for electoral reform and for the status of ′the will of the people′.
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