Public choice theory is a branch of economics that grew out of the analysis of taxation and its relation to public spending. While it emerged in the 1950s, it reached its apex of public attention in 1986 when James Buchanan, one the cofounders of the theory, received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Public choice theory in essence takes the microeconomic principles that economists use to understand people's decisions in the marketplace and applies them to analyze people's actions in the realm of politics: collective decision making (Shaw). Microeconomics is founded on the idea that people's activities in the marketplace are based solely on their own personal concerns. Public choice economists, like their microeconomist brethren, make the assumption that people are motivated chiefly by self-interest (Shaw). This essay will analyze Public Choice Theory through the lens of a Marxist theorist. We will find that Public Choice Theory, with its emphasis on the use of micro-economics to analyze political activity, is utterly at odds with the Marxist conception of economics and politics.
In essence, Public Choice theory is "ill named because the only choices it recognizes are essentially private" (Starr). Analysts who use this theory of economics to examine the political sphere "generally find that whereas self-interest leads to benign results in the marketplace, it produces nothing but pathology in political decisions" (Starr).
Marx would have had some very serious reservations about the use of micro-economic theory to explain political behavior. While Marx was the first person to truly understand the impact that economics had on history and politics, his view was predicated on macro-economic factors. One of the main problems that Marx would have had involves the fact that "one of the chief underpinnings of public choice theory is the lack of incentives for voters to monitor government effectively" (Shaw).
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