Public choice

Public choice applies economic reasoning to political decision-making, analyzing how individual incentives and institutional rules shape government behavior.

Rational ignorance: A condition in which the cost of learning about an issue exceeds the expected benefit of that knowledge. It explains why voters may remain uninformed when one vote rarely changes an election.
Methodological individualism: An approach that explains social outcomes through the actions and interactions of individuals. Public choice builds political explanations from the choices of people inside institutions.
Duncan Black: A Scottish economist whose work developed the theory of committee decisions and the median voter. His analysis of voting laid foundations for formal models of political competition.
Bureaucracy: An administrative organization governed by formal rules, specialized roles, and hierarchical authority. Public choice models how bureaucrats’ incentives affect agency decisions and public services.
Public interest theory: An account of government in which policies are adopted to correct market failures and serve the public interest. Public choice questions whether officials and agencies consistently act as impartial public-interest maximizers.
Rent-seeking: Efforts to gain economic advantage through political influence rather than productive activity. Groups can spend resources securing policies that transfer benefits to them.
Rational choice theory: A framework that models choices as attempts to pursue preferences under constraints. Its assumptions provide a common starting point for analyzing political incentives.
Kenneth Arrow: An American economist whose work established major results in social choice and general equilibrium theory. His impossibility theorem clarified limits on aggregating individual preferences.
Regulatory capture: A process in which a regulatory agency advances the interests of the industry it oversees. It illustrates how organized industries can influence agencies meant to regulate them.
Welfare economics: The branch of economics that evaluates how resource allocation affects social welfare. Public choice adds political incentives to analyses that may treat policy as an instrument of welfare improvement.

Linked from 33 pages