Public Choices Theory

Introduction

Public choices theory, an approach that combines political sciences and economy. It is a theory developed by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The simple definition of this theory is that collective political decision making is based on self-interested utility maximization on the part of all affected individual such as the official actors, interest group and also the public. In addition, this theory assumes that all political actors, voters, taxpayers, legislatures, bureaucrats, political parties are seek to maximize their own personal benefits in politics as a market places. Mueller (1989) defined public choices as “the economic study of non-market decision making, or simply the application of economics to political science. The basic behavioural postulate of public choice, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximize”. This theory more like focus on the behaviour of one person as driven by the goal of the utility maximization since every person have their own interest which are care about their families, friends and communities. Further, public choice also focused on how the motivation of one person affect the outcome of their collective decision making. Therefore, people are involved their own interest in the politics and gain the benefits through the decision making.

2.0 The Review of Public Choices Theory

1. Election, Voting and Representation

In some of the country, people choose their government through the public election. Every candidates have their own self-interest and the voters are voting because of their interest. Logrolling are one of the technique to gain the support from the voters. Candidates are packaging their manifesto to a bundle to attract greater support from the voters. Candidates can influences the people behaviour through their interest which knew as the manifesto. Example, if a candidate promises additional resources towards law enforcement and drug control, prison guards will benefit and should therefore be more likely to vote for that candidate. A candidate promising smaller government with less spending and taxation will be less appealing to a prison guard and more appealing to a small business owner, who will hope to benefit from having to pay lower taxes and being able to keep more profit.

2. Self-Interest

Politician won on the election will be the agent of the public but act in its interest. The problem will be existed when the agent of public act on their interest and not interest based on the principal. Every politicians have their very strong own objective.  At the same time, large majorities of the elected officials are actually driven by their self-interest and viewed as dishonest and selfish people. And once elected, politicians may well resort to vote-trading to get their own policies through the legislature. They agree to support measures that other legislators strongly favour in return for those legislators’ support on their own preferred projects. The project are actually can greatly bring benefit toward politicians and the politicians pay no cost or little cost to obtain these free benefits. In addition there are also some politicians put the country’s interest before their own.  However, it is also possible that there is a party interest that is distinct from a politician’s personal interest. Party interest happened when the politician in the party won the election, all the party would be benefited. This kind of party interest will lead to free-rider problem when other people in party can share the benefits without giving the equivalent contribution.   This problems existed long time ago but it is not easy to find the solutions.  A good government is who tends to implement the pure public good policies for the voters, but the politicians with self-interest have strong incentives for lobbying the government to implement specific policies that would benefit them by using the public funds and resources. In result, these lobbying activities will cause various inefficient policies and these inefficient policies will lead to government failures.

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