Some reflections on the next twenty-five years of public choice

First, my congratulations to this journal. Its establishment was not easy. Especially in the beginning it functioned as a source of ideas that were hard to get published elsewhere. Important in this respect was the advocated change in paradigm concerning the analysis of government behavior, notwithstanding the fact that this change largely consisted in the application of an existing paradigm — the neo-classical view — to politics. The journal also played an important role in getting economists and political scientists listening to each other, thereby giving an impulse to the integration (‘unification’) of at least two product divisions in the social sciences. This integration has not proved to be a one-sided, ‘imperialistic’, affair (cf. Ordeshook, 1989). The outstanding contribution of economists has been to show to other social scientists the strength of their rational choice approach, with its ingredients of methodological individualism, goal-oriented and self-interested behavior. By adopting this approach political scientists, and others, have in their turn been able to show its limitations and to modify and enrich it with their own theoretical insights. Recent developments in game theory have added impulses for a further elaboration of the approach, focusing on its strategic implications. Also, psychologists and sociologists (‘analytical sociologists’) seem increasingly interested, were it only to show the limitations. This confrontation from diverse fields in the social sciences is very wholesome, and will certainly impact on the future development of public choice.