Introduction

The analysis of the choice behavior of individual voters must be recognized as occupying a central place in any theory of democratic politics. This is so whether the ultimate purpose of the theory is normative or purely explanatory, and whether the theorizing is of the formal kind characteristic of modern public choice scholarship or rather more informal. Specifically, the theory of voter behavior has the same logical status in political analysis as the theory of consumer behavior in the analysis of markets. Voters are the demanders in the process of political exchange: To ignore voter calculus is therefore like trying to construct standard microeconomics without a theory of demand.

As we have already noted, within the public choice approach to political analysis no distinctive theory of demand is either offered or, in fact, deemed necessary. It has simply been taken for granted that the logic of choice applied in market contexts can be transferred without amendment to the electoral setting. Agents act rationally, whatever the institutional environment. Accordingly, the axioms of rational actor theory are all that one needs.