Public choice theory analyzes political decision-making from an economic perspective and uses the median voter theorem and the rational ignorance model to explain the interaction between politicians and voters. The median voter theorem explains that politicians will align their policies with the preferences of the median voter, and the rational ignorance model explains that voters remain ignorant due to the cost of acquiring information, which reveals the inefficiencies and limitations of political decision-making.
Public choice theory is the application of economic principles and methodologies to explain public sector decision-making, a field of political science. Public choice theory differs from traditional political science by starting from three assumptions.
The first assumption is methodological individualism, which means that the unit of analysis of any social phenomenon is the individual. Since groups are not seen as organic entities capable of making decisions, the state is seen as an aggregation of individuals who are decision-makers, and political phenomena are therefore seen as the collective outcome of individual decisions.
The second is the assumption that human beings are ‘economic beings’. Economic humans are rational humans who are self-loving and pursue their own interests. People put their own interests first, so they try to minimize costs and maximize benefits in order to achieve specific goals. However, costs, benefits, and utility vary from person to person. This assumption is crucial for predicting and analyzing human behavior. For example, when making political decisions, people try to make choices that are in their best interest. This shows that public choice theory focuses on understanding human nature and analyzing behavioral patterns accordingly.
The final assumption is that politics is essentially a matter of choice like economic markets in terms of supply and demand, and that political activity is also viewed as an act of exchange. From this perspective, politics is interpreted as a political market, with politicians as suppliers of goods and services and voters as consumers. In economic markets, people engage in transactions only if they believe they can benefit from the exchange. The same is true in political markets, where, contrary to the traditional view of economics, the outcome of a transaction affects not only the parties to the transaction, but also those not involved in the transaction. This influence is an important factor in understanding the social costs and benefits of political decisions. The impact of political decisions on society as a whole is often difficult to predict, and this is where public choice theory contributes to understanding the complexity of political decision-making.
Based on these three assumptions, public choice theory analyzes the social problems that arise from public sector decision-making, and one model that analyzes the problems caused by politicians and voters is the median voter theorem. The median voter theorem states that if a voter’s political preference on a single issue is a single preference with a single point, then the policies proposed by politicians from two competing parties will approach the median voter’s preferred policy. The median voter is the voter in the middle of the distribution of all voters according to their political preferences. The model makes several assumptions: the distribution of voters by political preference is bell-shaped and normal, and voters vote for the politician whose platform is closest to their preference system. In this case, a politician’s policies aimed at winning elections will tend to converge toward reflecting the preferences of the median voter, regardless of his political ideology. This can lead to anti-democratic outcomes, as decisions in a democracy are made by the median voter, a minority, rather than the majority. This can serve as a cautionary tale that political decisions can be driven by the interests of a particular group.
Another model is the rational ignorance model. Voters should care about which politicians reflect their preferences and vote, but some voters are not interested in voting. Public choice theory explains this phenomenon with the rational ignorance model. The rational ignorance model theorizes that voters who seek to maximize their utility will remain ignorant if the cost of acquiring information is greater than the benefit they would receive from it. Because politicians make political decisions that reflect the interests of the voters who support them, rational ignorance leads to inefficient public goods and services that are concentrated in the hands of interest groups that have a stake in a particular issue and are aligned with politicians. These results illustrate the limitations of political decision-making that public choice theory points out. Public choice theory emphasizes the need for institutional improvements to address these inefficiencies.
Buchanan, a public choice theorist, proposed constitutional political economy, which argues that the root causes and solutions to these inefficiencies in society should be found in constitutional institutions. In constitutional political economy, Buchanan distinguishes two levels of decision-making: “everyday politics,” where decisions are made at the legislative level after the enactment of a constitution, and “constitutional politics,” which sets the rules for everyday politics. Constitutional politics is the political activity of establishing a constitution that imposes constraints on everyday politics, and everyday politics is the political activity of utilizing various strategies within the constitution. He aimed to create rules for collective decision-making to be fair through constitutional politics, and to maximize the freedom of individuals to engage in everyday politics to pursue their interests within the constitution. To achieve this, he argued that the fundamentals of the constitutional system should be reformed. Since it is difficult for any of the decision-making participants to accurately calculate their own interests during the constitution-making process, they argued that it is in everyone’s interest to agree on the constitution itself, as opposed to agreeing on policies for specific purposes within the rules of the established constitution. This can be seen as an attempt to achieve both fairness and efficiency in political decision-making through constitutional reform. This approach to public choice theory has important implications for understanding and addressing the complexities of modern politics.
