The Impact of The Calculus of Consent

Clark and Lee consider the impact of The Calculus of Consent and public choice more generally. There is no doubt that Buchanan and Tullock made an important contribution to the economic and political science literature in their classic book. But our attempt to examine its impact on economic education, scholarship, and the political process leads to mixed conclusions. Public choice has had less impact on the teaching of basic economics than one might think. Though mentioned in almost all economic principle texts, it is done mostly in passing, with a primary contribution of The Calculus of Consent, systematic government failure, largely ignored. While market failure is prominently discussed, government failure receives almost no consideration, if it receives any at all. The Calculus has received a large number of scholarly citations and spawned a remarkable amount of research by some impressive economists and political scientists. But this research has not spread as widely through the academy as one would have predicted, given the interest people have in government and politics. And new fields in economics have developed with almost no consideration of public choice despite its relevance to those fields, with behavior economics being the example discussed. It is also difficult to detect any change in the political process that could be seen as the result of public choice. This is not surprising given the large number of factors that impact on politics and the fact that much of Buchanan’s and Tullock’s classic work suggests that it will not have much, if any, impact on how political decisions are made. We conclude our chapter, however, by arguing that political process is subject to long-run influences that can improve the political process, and, if this happens, The Calculus of Consent and the public choice scholarship that followed will deserve some of the credit.