Public choice and deviance: a comment

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2004 by Steven G. Medema

Professor McKenzie, in his interesting and insightful paper, puts forth the hypothesis that "deviance" plays a central role in the development of new fields and paradigms of inquiry, and that the success of the deviants is a function of the existence of certain underlying conditions--including strong, standard-setting personalities; the physical and intellectual remoteness of the deviant scholarly activity; the early development of a critical mass of like-minded scholars; having a base in a program that is not wedded to the dominant intellectual paradigm; the adoption of a bunker mentality; the cultivation of graduate students and visiting scholars who will spread the gospel upon their departure; and the establishment of professional organizations and publication outlets. There are few things to quibble with in Professor McKenzie's analysis, but let me see if I can expand the scope of the discussion a bit.

One immediate issue raised by Professor McKenzie's analysis is that of what constitutes "deviance." Professor McKenzie defines the term as "the search for carefully crafted ideas that initially seem absurd." Let us step back a bit and note that, first of all, deviance requires orthodoxy--a ruling paradigm. As such, the sort of deviance embodied in public choice could not have existed in the pre-World War II era, when economics was an incredibly pluralistic discipline and there was no dominant paradigm (or, in Professor McKenzie's mountain-climbing terminology, no accepted "peak"). Public choice would have flourished during this era, but the deviance characteristics about which Professor McKenzie spoke would not have been necessary for its success. Indeed, one will find more than a bit of public-choice-type analysis (albeit of a rather different nature) in the work of the early institutionalists. Public choice certainly would have established itself in this earlier period--but it would also have been more diverse.

A second issue, really a question, is whether public choice actually constituted or constitutes deviance at all, and, if so, to what extent. To get at this, we need to think about what public choice really was and is. Two aspects are rather clear:

1. Filling the void in the existing economics literature by examining how the government that carries out economic policy actually operates (what I would argue was the motivating force behind Jim Buchanan's interest in public choice);

2. An early branch of economic imperialism, wherein the lens of homo economicus is trained on the political process (which I would argue was the motivating force behind Gordon Tullock's interest in public choice).

In the first of these senses, one could certainly argue that public choice was deviant, in that it rejected the accepted Pigovian line of taking government as given and assuming that it could smoothly and efficiently correct all manner of supposed market failures. What public choice analysis showed, in a nutshell, was that market failure had its complement in government failure, and that the cure for market failure could well be worse than the disease.

But one could argue that, in the second of these senses, public choice (within economics at least) was not really deviant at all, in that it, following Lionel Robbins's (1932) dictum, applied the standard tools of economic analysis to situations of choice in the presence of scarcity--a standard extension of the neoclassical paradigm. Added to this was the fact that Jim Buchanan was already an established scholar within orthodox public finance--although Gordon Tullock was, and still continues to be, a maverick. It could be argued that Buchanan's "orthodoxy," so to speak, provided an entree and a degree of legitimacy that might not otherwise have been present--evidenced in the access of public choice scholarship to AEA sessions, National Science Foundation funding, and so on during the early days of the movement. While public choice was certainly deviant within political science, it was much less so within economics.

It is, I believe, legitimate to ask whether the most, or one of the most, significant aspects of the deviance here was ideological. Public choice, like law and economics, was fighting an interventionist tide that was very much dominant within the profession--a profession whose elegant mathematical flourishes purported to demonstrate the optimality of all manner of government interventions. While Buchanan and others self-consciously attempted to create an environment of inclusiveness early on, the rather non-interventionist character of many of the central early results of public choice analysis attracted, within economics at least, a particular type of adherent in the early stages of the movement's development and helped to give public choice its distinctive flavor.

Along with the role of ideology--indeed perhaps in part because of the ideological factor--I would also add to Professor McKenzie's list of ingredients for the success of public choice the substantial funding that it received during its developmental stage, both at the Thomas Jefferson Center in Charlottesville and then in Blacksburg. This funding made possible the Centers, conferences, the startup of Papers on Nonmarket Decision Making and subsequently Public Choice, the visiting scholars program, and, perhaps most importantly, the attraction and training of graduate students. (1)