Abstract
Since the publication in 1957 of Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy1 the theory of public choice has expanded into a broader and more far-reaching analysis of the economics of politics and government decision-making. Work by economists such as Bergson, Arrow and Sen stimulated interest in the area of normative public choice and normative theorists tended to concentrate on the government’s objectives being ultimately to maximise some social welfare function. Although Arrow2 proved that given certain conditions a social welfare function will be impossible to locate there has nevertheless been a tendency to overlook the motivation of individuals involved in public decision-making and to assume conveniently that their sole purpose is to maximise some given social welfare function.
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References
A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).
K. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1963).
A. Breton, The Economic Theory of Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1974) p. 3.
Downs, Economic Theory of Democracy, p. 247.
G. Tullock, ‘Some Problems of Majority Voting’, Journal of Political Economy, December 1959.
G. Tullock, Towards a Mathematics of Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967) p. 50.
A. Downs, ‘In Defense of Majority Voting’, Journal of Political Economy, April 1961.
G. Tullock and J. Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962).
G. Tullock, The Vote Motive (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976).
Ibid, p. 51.
Tullock and Buchanan, Calculus of Consent.
Tullock, Towards a Mathematics of Politics, p. 50.
W. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962).
Tullock, Towards a Mathematics of Politics, pp. 52–3.
Tullock, The Vote Motive, p. 23.
Breton, Economic Theory of Representative Government, chapter 3.
Ibid, p. 5.
Ibid, p. 7.
Ibid, chapter 4.
Ibid, chapter 7.
Ibid, p. 143.
Tullock, The Vote Motive, p. 29.
A. Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1967).
W. Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971)
W. Niskanen,Bureaucracy, Servant or Master? (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1973); ‘Bureaucrats and Politicians’, Journal of Law and Economics, December 1975; ‘The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy’, American Economic Review, May 1968
also in The Economics of Property Rights by E. Furubotn and B. Pejovich (Cambridge Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1974).
Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, chapter 5.
Breton, Economic Theory of Representative Government, p. 163.
Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, p. 45.
Ibid, p. 49.
A. Breton and R. Wintrobe, ‘The Equilibrium Size of a Budget Maximizing Bureau: A Note on Niskanen’s Theory of Bureaucracy’, Journal of Political Economy, February 1975.
Ibid, p. 198.
D. Mueller, Public Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 158.
Breton and Wintrobe, ‘The Equilibrium Size of a Budget Maximizing Bureau’, p. 205.
Breton, Economic Theory of Representative Government, chapter 10.
A. Breton and R. Wintrobe, The Logic of Bureaucratic Conduct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
J. Buchanan, ‘Politics, Policy, and the Pigovian Margins’, Economica, 1962.
Hansard, Vol. 896, Col. 1305–6.
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© 1986 P.D. Hann
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Hann, D. (1986). The Theoretical Framework. In: Government and North Sea Oil. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08083-0_3
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