"Public choice, or public choice theory, is 'the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science'. Its content includes the study of political behavior."
This studies decision-making in government institutions, seeing how policymakers' interests can influence how they make economic decisions.
Public Choice Theory: An economic theory that studies how individuals make decisions when faced with collective problems that require cooperation among its members.
Collective Action: How individuals organize themselves to achieve collective goals, despite conflicting individual interests.
Bureaucracy: The role of government agencies and their influence on policy outcomes.
Rent-Seeking: The pursuit of private gain through the use of resources that could have been used for more productive purposes.
Voting: The behavior of voters and factors that influence the outcome of elections.
Interest Groups: Organizations that try to influence public policy in specific areas by mobilizing members and resources.
Public Goods: Goods and services that are provided by the government and consumed collectively by citizens.
Regulation: The role of government in regulating markets and industries.
Institutions: The formal and informal rules governing behavior in society, including government institutions.
Game Theory: The study of strategic interaction among individuals, with the goal of predicting and understanding their behavior.
Principal-Agent Problem: The problem of aligning the interests of the principal (such as voters) and the agent (such as elected officials).
Public Choice Applications: Real-world applications of public choice theory in fields such as health care, education, and environmental policy.
Rational Choice Theory: It is concerned with analyzing how actors make decisions under conditions of scarcity, and how they use incentives and costs to make their choices.
Institution-based view: It focuses on the role of institutions in shaping political decisions and the behavior of political actors.
Behavioral Public Choice Theory: It considers how psychological factors affect political behavior and decision-making, such as social norms, heuristics, and biases.
Public Interest Theory: It suggests that the government acts in the public interest by balancing the competing interests of different groups.
Rent-Seeking Theory: It is concerned with the ways in which individuals and interest groups seek to gain rents or benefits from the government by influencing public policy.
Median Voter Theory: It suggests that in democracies, policies are determined by the preferences of the median voter.
New Public Management and Public Choice Theory: It combines the principles of public choice theory with the ideas of new public management to create a more efficient and effective public sector.
Democratic Public Choice Theory: It focuses on how democratic institutions and processes can be used to promote public welfare and reduce rent-seeking.
Fiscal Federalism Theory: It explores the distribution of power and responsibilities among different levels of government and how this affects public policy outcomes.
"It is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents (voters, politicians, bureaucrats) and their interactions."
"...which can be represented in a number of ways – using (for example) standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory."
"Economist James M. Buchanan received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 'for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making' in this space."
"In popular use, 'public choice' is often used as a shorthand for components of modern public choice theory that focus on how elected officials, bureaucrats and other government agents can be influenced by their own perceived self-interest when making decisions in their official roles."
"Public choice theory is also closely related to social choice theory, a mathematical approach to the aggregation of individual interests, welfare, or votes."
"Public choice analysis has roots in positive analysis ('what is') but is often used for normative purposes ('what ought to be') in order to identify a problem or to suggest improvements to constitutional rules."
"Rather, decisions are made by the combined choices of the individuals."
"The second is the use of markets in the political system, which was argued to be a return to true economics."
"The final is the self-interested nature of all individuals within the political system."
"As Buchanan and Tullock argued, 'the ultimate defense of the economic-individualist behavioral assumption must be empirical...The only final test of a model lies in its ability to assist in understanding real phenomena'."