Development
The modern literature in Public Choice began with Duncan Black, who in 1948 identified the underlying concepts of what would become median voter theory. He also wrote The Theory of Committees and Elections in 1958. Gordon Tullock refers to him as the "father of public choice theory".
James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock coauthored The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), considered one of the landmark works that founded the discipline of public choice theory. In particular (1962, p. v), the book is about the political organization of a free society. But its method, conceptual apparatus, and analytics "are derived, essentially, from the discipline that has as its subject the economic organization of such a society." The book focuses on positive-economic analysis as to the development of constitutional democracy but in an ethical context of consent. The consent takes the form of a compensation principle like Pareto efficiency for making a policy change and unanimity at least no opposition as a point of departure for social choice.
Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (1951) influenced formulation of the theory. Among other important works are Anthony Downs's An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) and Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965).
During the same decade, the probabilistic voting theory started to replace the median voter theory, since it clearly showed how it was able to find Nash Equilibria also in multidimensional space. The theory was later completely formalized by Peter Coughlin.
Read more about this topic: Public Choice Theory
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“On fields all drenched with blood he made his record in war, abstained from lawless violence when left on the plantation, and received his freedom in peace with moderation. But he holds in this Republic the position of an alien race among a people impatient of a rival. And in the eyes of some it seems that no valor redeems him, no social advancement nor individual development wipes off the ban which clings to him.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)