Theory Of Public Choice Theory

1. Introduction

Public choice or public choice theory means the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science, it also tries to explain how public decision are made. It is directed towards the study of politics based on the economic principles. The public choice theory is a strong variant of the rational choice theory. The theory is concerned with the provision of so-called public goods, goods that are delivered by government rather than the market, because, as with air, their benefit cannot be withheld from individuals who choose not to contribute to their provision. What lies at the heart of public choice theory is the self-interest maximization theory. Public choice works hand in glove with economics. Economics

While legislatures pass the laws, it is the bureaucracies that administer these laws. The traditional view of bureaucracy in a democracy derives from the famous sociologist Max Weber. He saw bureaucrats as knowledgeable, talented people who objectively administer the laws. More recently, bureaucrats has come to be a dirty word. Bureaucrats are seen as bungling, inefficient, and uncaring. Public Choice economists reject both of these views. They see bureaucrats as self-interested, rational, maximizers. In this view, bureaucrats act to maximize their own welfare. Their welfare depends on salary, perquisites, status in the agency and number of subordinates (power), size of the budget over which one has control, and non-monetary benefits(the quiet life). All of these are enhanced when the agency is growing. Thus, in this view, the main incentive is to maximize the size of the agency (known often as “empire

The term refers to efforts to capture monopoly or contrived rents through attempts to influence government. Rent-seeking involves the use of real resources to capture a pure transfer, and thus its efficiency reducing. Rent-seeking literature has grown at an enormous rate and at times seems to almost dominate any other single Public Choice insight. Fred McChesney (1987, 1997) expanded the concept of rent-seeking by modeling politicians as active forces in the political process as well. Under his model, rents can be extracted from private sector by threatening regulation or taxes. Thus, the absence of regulation does not necessarily indicate that there has been no resource waste through the rent-seeking