The public choice of educational choice

The very small literature explaining (i) how citizens have voted in two California voucher referenda, (ii) how legislators have voted on voucher bills in the State of Florida and the US Congress, and (iii) the variation across states in charter school provisions is summarized. New empirical evidence documenting the cross-state variation in the success of voucher referenda and voucher bills is examined. Voucher bill characteristics and state characteristics play important roles. Voucher bills have been passed only in the more conservative Republican states, and almost all of the successful voucher programs have been targeted at large, struggling school districts.     

Process choice

Regulation scholars have long searched for the best tools to use to achieve public policy goals, generating an extensive body of research on what has become known as instrument choice. By contrast, analysis of options for structuring how officials make regulatory decisions – process choice – remains in relative infancy. Notwithstanding the emphasis legal scholars and political economists have placed on administrative procedures, surprisingly little research has investigated why regulators choose among different process options or what value they and the public receive from different choices. In their book, Regulation by Litigation, Andrew Morriss, Bruce Yandle, and Andrew Dorchak make a significant contribution by empirically and normatively examining regulators' choices between notice‐and‐comment rulemaking, negotiated rulemaking, and what they call “regulation by litigation.” This review article considers three central questions about regulation by litigation. First, how if at all does regulation by litigation differ from other uses of litigation to achieve policy goals? Second, why do regulators choose litigation over other process options? Third, is regulation by litigation as bad as Morriss, Yandle, and Dorchak say it is? By addressing these conceptual, empirical, and normative questions, this review article not only reveals the specific strengths and limitations of the book, Regulation by Litigation, but also highlights more general opportunities and challenges for future research on process choice.     

Reapplying behavioral symmetry: public choice and choice architecture

Public Choice - New justifications for government intervention based on behavioral psychology rely on a behavioral asymmetry between expert policymakers and market participants. Public choice...     

Moral public choice

Public Choice should now integrate systematically considerations of ethics and justice for two kinds of reasons. First, moral principles can be implemented by self-centered individual who, however, care for others' judgments, and these others can thus have these principles implemented at no cost to themselves. Furthermore, direct moral motivations may be less negligible than it was assumed, and at any rate it may be time to focus on them. Second, the theory of justice has reached an integrated, rational maturity which makes it suitable for this purpose (whereas the “Social Choice” approach is plagued by serious problems of meaning).     

The choice for EU theorists: Establishing a common framework for analysis

European Journal of Political Research - European Union (EU) studies have entered a highly contentious and, arguably, creative phase. A range of theoretical perspectives, seemingly quite highly...     

Jobs and environmental quality: some implications for instrument choice

Both politicians and regulatory agencies are frequently forced to make tradeoffs among competing objectives. When these tradeoffs are highly sensitive, as in the case of jobs and environmental quality, they are rarely made explicitly. This paper takes on the task of uncovering the nature tradeoffs among jobs, economic growth and environmental quality. A case study of Wisconsin's innovative attempt for dealing with its air pollution problems provides important insights into why particular policy instruments are selected in balancing economic and environmental objectives. In line with observations of previous authors, the analysis reveals that there is a marked tendency for the political process to resist market mechanisms for rationing scarce environmental resources. In addition to providing a rationale and evaluation of the specific policy being developed by Wisconsin, the paper develops two testable hypotheses regarding the general selection of instruments for making tradeoffs among jobs and environmental quality.     

Happiness and public choice

Measuring individual welfare using data on reported subjective well-being has made great progress. It offers a new way of confronting public choice hypotheses with field data, e.g., with respect to partisan preferences or rents in the public bureaucracy. Insights from public choice also help to assess the role of happiness measures in public policy. We emphasize that maximizing aggregate happiness as a social welfare function neglects incentive problems and political institutions while citizens are reduced to metric stations. The goal of happiness research should be to improve the nature of the processes through which individuals can express their preferences.