Intellectual foundations of public choice, the forest from the trees

After War World II, a group of scholars began using rational choice models from economics and game theory to examine the manner in which public policies would be determined if men and women were as “rational” in their political activities as they were in other spheres of life. The implications of such an approach to politics were not obvious and took decades to be worked out. Indeed, they are still being worked out. The result was a new field of research that deepened our understanding of economic and political systems and their many interdependencies. This review essay provides an overview of the core findings of public choice during its first half century and of the boot-strapping process through which those findings emerged. Those core findings provide the idea base and results that ground most contemporary public choice research.