The Economics of Public Choice

The course is aimed at providing a basic overview of the problems of public choice theory. The course includes an analysis of voting behavior, the behavior of elected representatives, interest groups, and bureaucracy.
The course uses a rational choice model and the actors in political markets are
are understood as traditional "buyers" or "sellers", thus the course favours an economic way of thinking about political markets. The economic way of thinking about political markets and collective action allows us to analyse political and other collective institutions and also to assess the appropriateness of the settings of these institutions. The course thus partly covers the field of constitutional and institutional economics. The course also provides basic and key insights into economic policymaking in representative democracies, taking into account the rational actor model. Thus, it also deals with the inferior effects of implemented economic policies. Graduates of the course should be able to apply economic reasoning in a non-market environment and in a political markets at an intermediate level.