This book is a fully revised and updated version of Hans van den Doel's Democracy and Welfare Economics. It presents the economic theory of political decision-making (otherwise known as new political economy, or public choice), providing students with an accessible and clear introduction to this important subject. The authors identify four different methods of decision-making by which the political process transforms the demands of individual citizens into government policy, and these are analyzed in turn with reference to economic theory.

In chapter 2 we concluded that the present public choice and marxist approaches to the study of political processes, as far as relevant for the analysis of economic policy making, are unsatisfactory, for reasons of incoherency, insufficient empirical support, and lack of specificity~ It was suggested that a different approach to the subject might be fruitful. To that purpose, we now turn our attention to the so-called interest function approach to the study of politico-economic phenomena, that has been developed by Van Winden (1983). See also Van Winden (1987), Van Velthoven and Van Winden...