In his classic text, Dennis Mueller (1989, 1) defines public choice analysis as “the economic study of nonmarket decision making, or simply the application of economics to political science…. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer.” By its very nature, this interdisciplinary field of study was, at its start in the late 1950s and early 1960s, outside the mainstream of both economics and politics. Many economists were, at the time, wary of applying economic models where there were not formal markets and price mechanisms to govern relationships, while political scientists were skeptical of rationality assumptions and formal modeling techniques inherent in economic study. Today, however, economists seem quite comfortable with applying economic models to almost any worldly phenomena, and many introductory economics textbooks include a chapter specifically on public choice issues.

Public choice inroads into the mainstream of political science have been slower. Critics of the public choice paradigm are vocal, attacking its assumptions, its conclusions, and its impact, but are unable to fully account for its influence. Orchard and Stretton (1997), for example, argue that public choice analysis has been ideologically driven and dominated by the libertarian perspective.¹

They contend that its “assumption of exclusively rational, egoistic, materially acquisitive behaviour is now acknowledged to be unhelpful and to generate inaccurate predictions and false or inadequate explanations of political performance” (423) and that “research has also discredited the main branches of public choice micro-theory” (424). Yet, “despite these troubles, the movement flourishes” (424), perhaps because of the “deregulating, privatizing, tax-hating temper of the times” (425). Cohn (1999) notes that critics refer to rational choice as a “cult.”²

At this juncture, it appears fruitful to consider the overall status of public choice analysis in the social sciences. In this note, we seek to discover if public choice scholars truly differ in their methodological beliefs and conclusions from other economists and political scientists. Have their assumptions and conclusions been rejected or accepted? As a first grasp at tackling this issue, we circulated a survey containing 33 statements³

regarding various public choice model assumptions or predictions regarding the interplay of politics and economics. The survey was sent to 200 randomly selected members of the American Economic Association (AEA) and 207 randomly selected members of the American Political Science Association (APSA), as well as to almost everyone on the Public Choice Society (PCS) mailing list, which includes 201 economists and 125 political scientists.⁴ Our response rate was highest from members of the AEA, where 36.3% returned completed surveys, very similar to the Alston, Kearl, and Vaughan (1992) survey response rate of 34.4% among economists. The response rate for APSA members was only slightly lower at 33.2%, while the response rate for public choice scholars was modestly lower at 29.6%.

For each statement, respondents were asked how strongly they agreed with the given proposition, on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Their beliefs may be based on either theoretical grounds or on their reading of the degree of empirical support. We focus here on the 23 propositions that public choice scholars themselves agreed with, where we define “agreement” very broadly to include any case where an absolute majority “agreed” with the proposition by answering with a 4 or 5. Table 1 lists the propositions that meet our criteria for agreement among public choice scholars. Readers who wish to define group agreement using a stricter rule (such as a supermajority) may want to focus on a narrower subset of the presented questions.

We seek to explore if these economic and political propositions, which have been accepted within the public choice community, have also been accepted across the disciplines by general economists and political scientists, or if the rational/public choice approach remains unique to these particular scholars. Table 2 lists the number of respondents in each group that answered the question, the percentage from each group agreeing with the given proposition, and the difference compared to the responses of PCS members.

Economists generally accept the propositions that public choice scholars accept. Among the economists, support for these 23 propositions is generally a bit lower than among PCS members, but in only six cases does support differ by more than 10 percentage points, and only four propositions (H, K, L, and M) generate statistically significant (lower) differences in the level of agreement. Only two of the propositions that are accepted by a majority of PCS members are accepted by less than 45% of AEA members. The key to this fairly widespread agreement among economists and public choice practitioners may be proposition G: “individuals are rational utility-maximizers.” Mueller identified a similarly worded statement as the “basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics” (1989, 1: emphasis added) and the survey bears out his contention: 78% of Public Choice Society members and 70% of economists agree or strongly agree with this statement.⁵

Based on Table 2, we conclude that on most public choice issues the other economists generally accept public choice scholars' conclusions.

Although disagreements between public choice scholars and economists are fairly modest, Table 2 shows that the views of public choice scholars and political scientists often differ substantially. Almost half of the propositions that generate majority agreement among PCS members do not yield majority agreement among our sample of APSA members. Fourteen of the 23 propositions receive significantly lower degrees of support among APSA members. For 17 of the 23 propositions, APSA support is more than ten percentage points lower than PCS support; support is more than 20 percentage points lower in eight cases, and more than 40 percentage points lower in two cases. Again, the most telling difference is probably proposition G. While 78% of public choicers agree that “individuals are rational utility-maximizers,” only 33% of political scientists agree with this axiom. In fact, a plurality (43%) of political scientists disagree or strongly disagree with this idea (while 24% are neutral on the issue), which is fundamental to rational choice modeling.

Among the other propositions that are accepted by public choice scholars for which APSA members' support is noticeably weaker (more than twenty percentage points lower) are these: when transaction costs are low, the market achieves the efficient allocation of resources regardless of how property rights are assigned (popularly known as the Coase Theorem) (proposition H);⁶

that government does more to protect and create monopoly power than it does to prevent it (proposition K); that voting-with-the-feet migration sorts people into groups with homogeneous tastes (proposition L); that voting rules should limit the incentive for strategic voting (proposition R); that most politicians are solely office-seeking vote maximizers (proposition U); that most government programs are driven by rent seeking (proposition V); and that individuals often move in response to local government taxes and expenditures (proposition W). Disagreement across the two groups occurs over a wide variety of public choice topics.

To answer the titular question–public choice scholars are not much different than the typical economist, but they are considerably different than general political scientists. This finding suggests that critics of public choice analysis, such as Orchard and Stretton, are too hasty in concluding that the assumptions and conclusions of public choice analysis have been discredited. Indeed, they are widely accepted by mainstream economists. This also suggests that the movement will continue to flourish among economists because of common reliance on the basic operating assumption of rational utility maximization–the very reason that it will probably continue to have less success among political scientists.