Study On Public Choice And Its Applications

Public choice focuses on collective-decision making from the point of view that the individual is the fundamental unit of decision making. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice is that man is an egoistic, rational utility maximizer. The subject matter of public choice is the same as that of political science: voting rules, party politics, voter behavior, the bureaucracy, the logic of collective action, constitutional political economy, and so on. Public choice, which has changed people's traditional opinion about politics, studies politics by the method of economics.Public choice is different from political science mainly in their assumptions of individual motivation, and the methodologies they employ. The assumptions and the methodology of public choice play a very important role in the studying of the theories of public choice and their applications. The theories of public choice provide us an effective tool to study political and/or social problems.The main contents of this paper can be divided into two parts: in one part, the paper has a deep going and systematic study on the methodology of public choice; in another part, the paper makes applied researches according to the fundamentals of public choice. The applied research on evaluations has developed the areas of public choice, and provides a new way of studying on social evaluation and public policy evaluation.The paper studies on the methodology of public choice in chapter 2. As a whole, public choice has the same fundamental characters of methodology that can be summarized in three presuppositions: methdoliogical individualism, rational choice, and politics-as-exchange. However, there exist a lot of differences among different theories of public choice, such as what a maximizer's objective function and the relevant constraints are, the maximizer is an organization or an individual, it's a positive or a normative study, and so on. All these differences are discussed. Especially, the paper makes a comparative study on the methodologies of the theories of public choice by Towns, Niskanen, Dunleavy, Olson, Arrow, and Buchanan.The paper makes applied researches in chapter 3 to chapter 6. The main work and conclusions are as follows:(1) On self evaluation and mutual evaluations of the members of a group. Postulate that the motive of the members of a group in the process of evaluating is to rank ahead of others the more the better, the logic of the "constitutional" choice in the process of deciding the weights of attributes is analyzed, and the "constitutional" calculus models under different types of information are established.(2) On social evaluation. The concept of social evaluation is defined from the point of view of public choice. A conclusion is reached that there are not any definite criteria on social evaluations, that social evaluations could not be obtained from the definition directly, that the way to obtain social evaluations in a constitutional democratic country is to have some authoritative organizations be the evaluators. The motives and strategies of authoritative organizations are analyzed; the necessity and contents of making meta-evaluations to evaluations made by authoritative organizations are presented.(3) On evaluating public policy. The logic of evaluating public policy is established; a two-level framework on analyses of public policy evaluation is proposed, that is, between public policy evaluations with the given standard and evaluations to the standard; the concepts of a scientific evaluation of public policy and a rational evaluation of public policy are defined from the point of view of public choice. The objects and the methods of an evaluator of public policy are analyzed, some ways of building a successful operating system of public policy evaluation is proposed.(4) On social norms from the point of view of public choice. Social norms and morals are defined. It is analyzed that whether it is possible that rational person can cooperate each other by models of static game of the prisoner's dilemma and the endless-repeated one, two models gives two different answers, the conditions that defining an endless-repeated game and that the game to have a cooperative equilibrium is analyzed, conditions that social norms can be erected are discussed.