Abstract
This chapter introduces the economic or public choice approach to studying politics and public administration. It explains the rationality assumptions as predictive devices and how they are applied to types of agent rather than biological ones. It introduces the idea of formal models to provide predictions and how they can be applied to actual social and political processes. It introduces four concepts central to this way of thinking: opportunity costs, incentives, thinking at the margin and voluntary trade. It then introduces the main themes of several schools of public choice and then introduces the themes of the rest of the book.
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Dowding, K., Taylor, B.R. (2020). Introduction. In: Economic Perspectives on Government. Foundations of Government and Public Administration. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19707-0_1
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