Steunenberg, B.

Leiden University Scholary Publications

Boekbespreking van: The public choice approach to politicsSteunenberg, B.CitationSteunenberg, B. (1994). Boekbespreking van: The public choice approach to politics. Acta Politica, 29: 1994(4),510-513. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3450241 Version: Publisher's VersionLicense: Leiden University Non-exclusive licenseDownloadedfrom: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3450241 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable).'■1AP 1994/4 BoekbesprekingenHet is hiervoor al enkele malen gezegd: Andeweg en Irwin kunnen boeiend schrijven, en in de paragrafen waarin zij andere meningen aan bod laten komen, dwingen zij de lezer tot meedenken. Het is dan ook een boek dat zonder meer kan worden aangeraden als een boeiende, politicologische inleiding in de Nederlandse politiek.P. SchuszlerDennis C. Mueller, The Public Choice Approach to Politics, Edward Elgar, Ai­dershot 1993.The Public Choke Approach to Politics is a collection of papers on public choice, previ­ously pubhshed by Dennis Mueller. The book contains early contributions to this lit­erature, which are focused on the extent to which vote-trading or logrolling may in­crease social welfare, and recent work on the future of public choice, which has been published in the 1993 volume of the journal Public Choice. The book starts with a au­tobiographical essay in which Mueller describes his career in pubhc choice, which he combined with work in the field ofindustrial organization. He attributes his presence in both fields ‘entirely to chance’, although, looking back, he notes some similarities between these different and separate interests. In his view, pubhc choice focuses on government as an organization ‘for economizing on decision-making costs in joint consumption activities’, while industrial organization, in the Coase-Wilhamson tradi­tion, analyses firms as ‘teams of factor owners brought together to achieve gain.s from cooperation in production . Still, these similarities are hardly convincing reasons for someone to become involved in both these fields, so Mueller’s contributions to pub­hc choice must indeed be conceived as a matter of luck.In the last chapter of the book pubhc choice is defined as ‘all works that assume ra­tional, self-interested behaviour on the part of all pohtical actors ... regardless of how formal the analysis may be in terms of mathematical modelling, or whether it appears in an economics, pohtical science, sociology or other journal’ (p. 510). It is an ‘inherently interdisciphnary’ field, as Mueller notes, which covers most of the topics in pohtical science, such as voting rules, party behaviour, coahtion formation, voting theory, and bureaucracy. Mueller also typifies this literature as ‘the economics ofpohtics’ (p. 431), which contains positive as well as normative models of collective decision-making based on the postulate of man as a self-interested utility maximizer. He does not make a distinction between ‘pubhc choice’ and ‘social choice’, but uses these terms ‘inter­changeably to refer to a single body of hterature spanning the works of Arrow and Bu­chanan, Sen and Downs, and all the other analyses of government and pohtical behavi­our that uses the methodology of economics, broadly defined, that assumes that indi­viduals rationally seek to advance their self interest’ (p. 424). Given the large number of topics in this hterature, it is not surprising that Mueller’s work only covers a limited number. In the book his contributions are classified under six headings.Part I contains Mueller’s work on the contractarian approach to pubhc choice, which includes contributions on Rawls’ theory ofjustice, the nature of constitution­al rights, and the ethical impheations of both individuahsm and contractarianism as ethical postulates. Part II deals with electoral and voting rules, and pays attention to probabilistic voting and voting by veto. Part III addresses the composition and size of government. Two contributions go into the effect interest groups may have on the size of government. The last contribution in this part is a survey of pubhc choice ht­erature on the growth of government, which later appeared as chapter 17 in Mueller’s monograph Public Choice II.Part /^contains two contributions on the Virginia School of pubhc choice, and in particular the work of one of its members, James M. Buchanan. In his essay on Bu­chanan, Mueller reviews Buchanan’s contractarian approach. Part V contains Mueller’s famous survey of the pubhc choice hterature, which appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature and formed the basis of his 1979 monograph on Public Choice. This monograph was subsequently thoroughly revised and extended, and appeared as Public Choice II in 1989. Part VI concludes the book and goes into what are perhaps the most interesting issues, namely the methodology and fùture of pubhc choice.Mueller’s concern with the pubhc choice methodology and in particular the homo ec- onomicus postulate, is apparent in several contributions. This postulate simply states that individuals seek to advance their own interest rationally. Using this ‘unromantic view of man’s nature’ (p. 419), the pubhc choice hterature contains a large number of rather cynical and pessimistic conclusions about the functioning of democratic governmental institutions. The best-known example of this pessimism is perhaps Arrow’s paradox. In his essay on ‘James M. Buchanan: Economist cum Contractarian’ (chapter 22), Mueller claims that this pessimism is not ‘some form ofideological bias’, but a result of the sub­ject matter itself and the view of man as captured by the homo economicus postulate.Pessimistic results are perhaps disturbing, but not problematic if they are supported by empirical evidence. At this point, the pubhc choice hterature stiU faces some im­portant anomahes, which ought to be problematic for the authors of these elegant analytical models. One example is the voting paradox, another is the large voluntary contributions to the provision of pubhc goods. In his Presidential Address to the Pubhc Choice Society in 1986 (chapter 25), Mueller pays attention to these phenom­ena and proposes to replace the ‘rational egoism’ postulate with what he calls ‘adap­tive egoism’. Building on behavioural psychology he stresses the importance of past experience for human behaviour. Behaviour is affected not only by what may hap­pen in the fùture, but also by what happened in the past, since, as a result of learning, individuals can be conditioned to act in a specific way in recurrent situations by re­warding some and punishing other kinds ofbehaviour. Mueller correctly stresses the importance of a deontological or backward-looking perspective for the future devel­opment of pubhc choice instead of the teleological or forward-looking perspective that the rationahty postulate imphes.However, it is questionable whether adaptive or learning behaviour can be mod­elled ‘as if an individual maximizes a ‘socially conditioned or an evolutionary mold­ed objective fùnction’ (p. 505). In Mueller’s view the individual’s objective fùnction 510 51IAP 1994/4SummariesAP 1994/4only needs to be changed in such a way that expectations about future outcomes of actions also have to be based on experience. Behaviour is therefore still some optimi­zation problem on a case-by-case basis, where learning is reduced to knowing some ‘tricks’ to solve specific social dilemmas. But how do individuals know when to em­ploy a specific ‘trick’ in a specific situation, which is, in their perception, at least to some extent, unique or unrelated to previous situations? A way to solve this problem is to assume that individuals follow specific ‘rules’, which restrict their behaviour to a limited repertoire of actions. In that case, an individual will choose some action, say a*, if a situation is identified as being an element of a specific class for which a* is re­garded as the most appropriate response. This also imphes that a rule-following indi­vidual win select action a* even if this action is ‘non-optimal’ from the perspective of optimization on a case-by-case basis. The individual uses generic rules and does not approach a specific choice as a separate and isolated problem. Consequently, learning, and, accordingly, behavioural changes, are concentrated at the level of rules and not at the level of individual choice problems, in contradiction to what Mueller suggests.With regard to the future of public choice, Mueller is confident that public choice win be a field within economics, which ‘wiU encompass all ofpohtical science’ (p. 511) in one of his scenarios. On the other hand, he predicts that, ‘ [i]f a large enough group of departments were to resist the swing to more formal modeUing and were to retain control of several journals, pohtical science could possibly divide into two dis- ciphnes essentially along methodological lines’ (p. 512). Despite his optimism, Mueller is also rather sceptical about the future development of this hterature. ‘The journals today are filled with ingenious answers to unimportant questions. Pubhc choice today stands in danger of following down this well-worn path’ (p. 441). To Mueller, research in public choice should address ‘...the basic issues of how selfrinter- ested individuals interact within pohtical institutions, and how individuals could de­sign institutions that would better achieve their ends’ (p. 442). With respect to changes of the basic postulates of pubhc choice he predicts ‘that most wfil continue to mine the intensive margin of ever-more refined model-building on a narrow behav­ioural foundation, rather than shift out to the extensive margin where economics, ra­tional pohtics, sociology and psychology come together’ (p. 514). A rather pessimis­tic and thus ‘conservative’ view, using Mueller’s own definition (p. 424), on an im­portant and exciting hterature that has been developed in the last three decades.As with most pubheations of coUected work, this book suffers from a lack of co­herence. It is neither an introduction to the pubhc choice approach to pohtics, nor a systematic analysis and discussion of this approach. The only two common elements in most contributions are that they are on pubhc choice and written by the same au­thor. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading most of the papers, since Dennis MueUer is a gifted writer. But I doubt whether the book will appeal to many scholars in the social sciences. In my view, this book is only to be recommended to those who are interest­ed in MueUer’s work, in particular on constitutional issues and voting rules, but who have not yet read his papers.B. SteunenbergThe rise and establishment of Agalev and Vlaams Blok in the 1980s and 1990sby Marc SwyngedouwAnalyses of the Flemish-Belgian pohtical system in the post-war period have always em­phasized the role of three main pohtical cleavages or value orientations, based on, respec­tively, economic, rehgious and language-community divisions. Theoretical analyses of the growth of new (environmental or extreme right-wing) parties, and of the increased mobihty of voters, have impbed that the post-war cleavage model is undergoing funda­mental changes. In the first part of this article the social-structural elements leading to the development of these new parties in Flanders is described. In the second part the changing value orientations of the Flemish electorate are analysed on the basis of a large-scale repre­sentative survey of Flemish voters (N=2488), held immediately after the national elections of 1991 ■ The value orientations that were discovered in the Flemish electorate reveal that the materialism-post-materialism cleavage, which has been studied by Inglehart, is clearly recognizable in this electorate. Nevertheless, it proves to be impossible to describe the en­tire Flemish electoral space by using Inglehart s model. Instead, a cleavage is discovered that appears to be based on the opposition of universalist culturally ‘open’ values versus particularist culturally ‘closed’ values.Charles Taylor on individualism, politics and the inevitability of mo­ralityby Hans BloklandThe Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor can be seen as one of the most influential communitarian critics of contemporary liberalism and individualism. In this article, Tay­lor’s views on the current interpretation of individualism — labeled by Taylor as the cul­ture or ethics of authenticity’ — and on the growing importance of instrumental rationality in our society are critically assessed, and the political consequences of these views are eval­uated. Taylor’s ideas about the relation between the individual and the community are il­lustrated by focusing on the issue of minority rights: what is the importance of belonging to a cultural community and should this community be protected by special rights against512 513

Boekbespreking van: The public choice approach to politics

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