Austrian Public Choice: An Empirical Investigation
That is the title of a paper that examines some of the same main subjects that we do here, including an empirical look at political entrepreneurship, and the confluence of public choice with Austrian economics. The authors do not use political entrepreneurship in the institution-changing sense that we tend to use the term here, but instead as a descriptor of policymakers, legislators, regulators, and others decision units within government.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically some of the key propositions that can be derived when one combines insights from Public Choice and Austrian economics. We call this approach Austrian Public Choice. These key propositions are (1) that political markets are dynamic processes driven by the action of suppliers and demanders of public policies behaving as entrepreneurs, (2) that these political entrepreneurs are ignorant ex ante of factors that can matter as the regulatory process unfolds, suggesting that they imperfectly anticipate what will ultimately matter for policy decisions, and (3) that these political entrepreneurs learn over time and use local knowledge to discover future opportunities in political markets. Using a dataset of utility initiated rate reviews in the U.S. electricity industry, we find support for these propositions, which suggests that Austrian economics could shed new lights on questions typically raised by Public Choice scholars.
View and download Austrian Public Choice: An Empirical Investigation by Jean-Philippe Bonardi and Rick Vanden Bergh.