By Richard Jong-A-Pin and Christian Bjørnskov

Why do trade policies typically favour certain groups of industries? Why do politicians regularly ignore large groups of their voters? Why does corruption persist as a major problem in large parts of the world although everyone recognises how problematic it is? These and other questions are central to the field with the social sciences known as Public Choice. Public choice is the study of how self-interest, incentives, and rational decision-making shape political behavior, applying economic principles to understand how politics actually works.

Public choice is a vast field situated at the intersection of political science and economics with a rich history as well as immense diversity of topics and approaches. As the 1986 recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, James Buchanan, along with his co-author Gordon Tullock emphasised in 1962 in their seminal The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, at the core of public choice is an insistence on symmetrical behavioural assumptions. If we assume that people follow their own, individual best interest in a rational way in the marketplace, on the job, and in investment decisions, we should also assume that they follow their own, individual best interest in a rational way in the political sphere as voters, politicians and members of interest groups, and in the civil service as bureaucrats.

A public choice approach, therefore, includes a vast array of potential topics, some of which cannot be understood at all without this specific approach. Instead of focusing on a particular set of topics, Buchanan famously defined public choice as “politics without romance”. Adopting a public choice approach often differs from those of more traditional methods in political science and public economics that “romantically” tend to regard the government, politicians and bureaucrats as benevolent servants of the people. Putting together and editing an encyclopedia of the field is, therefore, both a daunting task as well as a great privilege. The new Edward Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice reflects the breadth and depth of the field by including 118 entries on a large variety of topics.

The sheer number of entries reflects the fact that public choice as a field is defined by its analytical approach instead of a specific topic of interest, which has developed within the social sciences over the course of the last 70 years. When public choice arose as a field of its own in the 1960s, it was a major detour from traditional approaches by insisting on employing the same fundamental assumptions that economists typically use to analyse people’s actions in private decision-making – when buying, selling, getting employment and making investments – when analysing actions in collective decision-making.

Yet, as economists and political scientists at the time realised, how would we be able to understand corruption problems if we did not assume that politicians and bureaucrats follow their own private interests when taking bribes? How would a phenomenon like a political business (or budget) cycle – that governments systematically adopt expansionary economic policies before elections – be explained without assuming that they maximise their re-election chances instead of implementing the objectively best policies? And, taking a page out of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, how can we understand the prevalence of protectionist trade policy despite a near-universal consensus among economists that free trade is almost always the optimal policy? These, and many other questions that have only gained in relevance in recent years, demand a public choice approach.

The purpose of the new Encyclopedia is to provide a comprehensive and authoritative resource of these and many other topics that allows those with an interest in how politics actually works to navigate the vast and diverse area of public choice. The encyclopedia therefore includes both theoretical and empirical aspects, as well as entries on the history of the field and its philosophical background. Each entry is written to provide an overview and understanding of a specific topic and is, therefore, also meant as a place to start when researching topics, and as a source of inspiration for further research.

All entries are written by a diverse mix of established scholars and young talent from across the world – all leading scholars and experts within their respective subfields of public choice – and thus provide insightful and updated surveys and insights. We hope – and trust – that this Encyclopedia will be interesting and accessible to a wide audience including students, researchers, journalists, professionals, and anyone interested in understanding how politics affects economics and how economics affects politics.

Richard Jong-a-Pin is associate professor of economics at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and served on the board of the European Public Choice Society.

Christian Bjørnskov is professor of economics at Aarhus University and served on the boards of the European Public Choice Society and the Public Choice Society. He was the president of the latter in 2024-25.

Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice is scheduled to release in October 2025.

Learn more here.