An Empirical Test of Public Choice Theory

In 1980, James Q. Wilson, in The Politics of Regulation, predicted that laws with diffuse costs and concentrated benefits would be relatively easy to enact, but that laws with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits would be relatively hard to enact and, once enacted, hard to maintain. This hypothesis, one of the pillars of public choice theory, has long been asserted without empirical verification. Indeed, in 1994, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, in Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, challenged the willingness of theorists to accept such unverified predictions as true: “The discrepancy between the faith that practitioners place in rational choice theory [of which public choice theory is a branch] and its failure to deliver empirically warrants closer inspection of rational choice theorizing as a scientific enterprise.” In Public Choice Theory & Earmarked Taxes, Susannah Camic Tahk provides the first rigorous empirical support for Wilson’s hypothesis.