Economic Theories of Politics and Public Finance

Abstract

Over the last twenty years a succession of theories of politics has appeared of which the hallmark is an attempt to adapt utilitarian marginalism to the purpose of political explanation. Theories in this intellectual style may be designated ‘economic’ theories of politics since utilitarian marginalism was first developed in the context of economic theorizing; its invention was indeed the birth of a notion of ‘economies’ as distinct from the ‘political economy’of Smith, Ricardo, Marx and J. S. Mill. Anthony Downs pioneered the economic approach with his bravura economic theory of democracy in 1957, which remains probably the best-known example of it. Many of the fundamental objections to economic theories of politics were explored by C. B. Macpherson in 1961 in a brief but penetrating essay; but Macpherson's essay was not decisive in checking the popularity of such theories. Despite his criticism, they have continued to proliferate.

The Rational Choice Paradigm and the Allocation of Agricultural Development Resources

“…It has been relatively easy to appear to undermine RCP by detailing the analytic deficiencies (and implicit ideological biases) of Downs' work (e.g. Toye, 1976). 7. The general importance of existing institutional patterns in shaping political behaviour is argued in Hall (1986), especially Chapter I.…”

The Making of Economic Policy

“…Judged by such criteria, the study of policy-making might be thought of as lacking in rigour. True, the public choice literature (see Mueller, 1979, for a survey) applies the methodology of neoclassical economics to the political arena, but despite the large and growing body of literature on public choice the substantive results are relatively limited, and there are serious grounds for questioning the applicability of the neoclassical paradigm to the study of policy-making or politics generally (see, e.g., Toye, 1976). A more specific problem with the public choice approach concerns the arguments of the utility function that individuals are adjudged to maximize; the appropriate arguments are less clearly defined in a political as opposed to an economic context, and are often harder to quantify.…”

Macroeconomic Policy Analysis

“…A narrow focus on technical efficiency alone is potentially misleading (see e.g. Okun, 1975;Samuels and Mercuro, 1984;Toye, 1976). In addition, the consideration of the operation of political mechanisms in practice may demand an analysis of distributional aspects (see e.g.…”