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).     

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.     

Utilitarianism and rational choice

Abstract. Rational choice theory springs from the utilitarian premises that what is best for society is nothing but the sum of what is best for each individual and what is best for the individual is best understood by the individual himself. Modern research, however, has often found both these premises to be invalid. Sometimes rational individual action leads to collectively irrational decisions. Occasionally, individual preferences emerge out of irrational motives. Other theories of the relation between man and society such as the doctrines of paternalism and the general will are therefore analyzed. The conclusion is that the present difficulties of rational choice theory can be attributed to its reluctance to integrate our empirical knowledge of the decision making of parties and organizations. There is room for a new theory that makes the rulers more independent of their voters than they are in rational choice theory, but more bound than they are in practice.     

Privatization as institutional choice

A model based upon the common concept of rent-seeking behavior avoids an exclusive focus on the pecuniary motive in private institutions and the power motive in public institutions. Using this model, the case for privatization ranges from very strong to unpersuasive, with some fascinating intermediate cases. Where purchases are frequent, information is abundant, costs of a bad decision are small, externalities are minimal, and competition is the norm, privatization ought to be pursued. At the other extreme, in situations where externalities and collective interests abound, natural monopolies are dominant, distributional goals are important, or debate and experience will alter preferences, governmental determination of service levels and public provision should continue. Intermediate situations such as those involving education, health, and some aspects of enterprise development provide the most interesting and hotly debated areas. These intermediate situations have both private and collective characteristics, choices are made infrequently with little information, have monumental consequences, distributional considerations are critical, and public debate about the level and type of service substantially affects individual behavior.