Abstract
Neoclassical welfare economics still looms large in the discipline of public choice. Particularly, by constructing analogies of political competition fundamental shortcomings of “old” neoclassical paradigms found their way into a “new” theory of political economy. Especially the failure to deal with the problem of limited knowledge and with the role of institutions obscured fundamental differences between political and economic systems of coordination and control. Hence, I propose a non-neoclassical perspective, using Hayekian concepts like “competition as a discovery procedure” or “spontaneous order” to develop an alternative agenda for many fields of public choice. I shall first outline a critique of neoclassical equilibrium settings in economics and in similarly constructed models of democracy. Then various properties of economic and political institutions, the competition of ideas and institutional competition among jurisdictions will be discussed in an evolutionary perspective. Not surprisingly, these applications reveal some similarities to central themes of constitutional political economy.
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