Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources: Methodological Explication and Critique

Author(s): Mark Sproule-Jones

Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 790-804
Published by: American Political Science Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1962971
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 Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources:
Methodological Explication and Critique
MARKSPROULE-JONES
McMaster University

The article is a methodological examination of public choice analysis, with particular reference to
the currently topical policy field of natural resources. It is also a methodological critique of public
choice analysis on logical, epistemological, and normative grounds. Its purpose is to make scholars of
natural resources management aware of the substantive and methodological features of the public
choice approach to the field, and to make public choice scholars and philosophers of science aware of
the methodological grounds of the approach.
The so-called hard core of concepts of public choice are first described in relation to the natural
resource policy field, and the selection of these hard core concepts, as well as their distinguishing
features from political science, economics, and public administration, are justified. The argument is
advanced that the hard core is interrelated by the methodological criterion of logical consistency-one
interpretation of the notion of rationality-and the criterion accounts for the impetus behind the
growth of the paradigm. It is also argued that the paradigm is buttressed and protected from rival ap-
proaches at an epistemological level, and it is shown that a variety of epistemologies have been linked
to the approach. Finally, I argue that the congruence of public choice with this variety of epistemolo-
gies makes many of the criticisms about the normative implications of the approach inaccurate and
misleading.

The management of natural resources is a counterpart, a specialized academic journal

major item on the agenda of most governments,
and the scarcity of particular natural resources,
such as energy-producing resources, is a matter of
concern to citizens in many communities. It is a
policy arena, however, where knowledge is often
conflicting and complex.
There is a stream of theory and scholarship that
embraces the more traditional fields of eco-
nomics, political science, and public administra-
tion, and that offers the prospect of coherent and
systematic knowledge about natural resource
management. This is public choice analysis, which
is now a major interest of social scientists in North
America and Europe. One objective of this article
is to explicate the major features of a public
choice analysis of natural resource management.
A second objective is to examine critically
public choice analysis itself. The paradigm has
grown in its number of practitioners, its theo-
retical sophistication, and its policy applications.
It is institutionalized in the manner of mature
paradigms: there is a Public Choice Society, a
European Society to match its original American
(Public Choice), and an increasing number of
textbooks attempting to codify its findings and
pointing the way to new endeavors.' But this
growth and maturation of an academic paradigm
has taken place with little or no self-conscious
methodological framework of self analysis. Fun-
damental criticisms of the methodological prem-
ises of social sciences provided by philosophers of
science have been largely ignored by public choice
analysts and practitioners.2 Particularly important
is the criticism that the empirical-analytical dis-
tinction characterizing modern social science leads
to a narrow concern with "technical rationality"
and a narrow set of misguided normative postures
(e.g., Bernstein 1975; Giddens 1976; and the so-
called Frankfurt School). This article attempts to
answer such criticism in the context of public
choice and also attempts to fill the obvious gap in
methodological awareness about the public choice
paradigm. It is a methodological explication of
public choice analysis from within public choice,
and a methodological critique of the analysis from
outside the paradigm.

I wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of
Richard L. Bish, James C. McDavid, Patricia L.
Richards,WilliamC. Mitchell,DonaldS. Schwerinand
DouglasE. Williamson an earlierdraft. The comments
of the anonymousrefereesof thisjournalwereusefulin
revision.
'These include Bish (1971), Bish and Ostrom (1973),
Riker and Ordeshook (1973), Sproule-Jones (1975),
Plott (1976), Schmid (1978), Frolich and Oppenheimer
(1978), Mueller (1979), Abrams (1980).
2Two exceptions are McDavid (1976) and Buchanan
(1959).

790
1982 PublicChoiceTheoryand NaturalResources
The organization corresponds to these two ob-
jectives. Findings and implications of public
choice analysis for natural resource management
are used throughout to illustrate the explication.
In this regard, this article differs considerably
from the major texts and overviews of public
choice, which tend to offer only passing allusions
to the rich policy field of natural resources. The
concern with this policy area also means that cer-
tain features of public choice analysis which are
often given only limited attention are highlighted
in more detail. For example, I emphasize the use
of property rights as a form of institutional ar-
rangement for natural resource management and
mismanagement.
More important, the article is organized around
the central methodological features of a
paradigm. Section 1 uses the notion of a hard core
of concepts developed by Lakatos (1974) to de-
scribe the crux of public choice analysis. Section 2
presents a justification of the selection of the hard
core concepts, as well as the features that dis-
tinguish these concepts from those of political
science, economics, and public administration.
In Section 3 the analysis changes from an inter-
nal explication to an explication and critique from
outside the paradigm. Attention is given to the
principle that underlies and animates public
choice theorizing and its applications. It is argued
that logical consistency is the criterion that inter-
relates the hard-core concepts of public choice,
and that this criterion is the impetus behind the
expansion of the paradigm.
Section 4 contains the explicit examination of
the epistemological foundations of public choice
analysis. I argue that a variety of epistemologies
has been offered as grounds for the interpretation
of, and as evidence for, public choice proposi-
tions. This variety enables the paradigm to main-
tain itself against rival theories. Further, the
variety of epistemologies used by public choice
carries a variety of normative implications, and
hence charges about a particular normative cast to
public choice are false and misleading.
Hard Core
The basic concepts of a public choice analysis
of natural resource management may be con-
sidered the hard core of the paradigm or research
program. The notion of a hard core is derived
from Imre Lakatos, the historian of science, who
argues that scientific paradigms or research pro-
grams consist of two parts: the first, the negative
heuristic, comprises the basic assumptions and
auxiliary hypotheses which are accepted as a per-
manent hard core not subject to falsification by
empirical testing. The second part, the positive
791
heuristic, is composed of the guidelines, sugges-
tions, and supplementary hypotheses that develop
the empirical and analytical range of the research
program. The positive heuristic is subject to em-
pirical verification, unlike the negative heuristic.
Proponents of the research program are not pre-
pared to use core concepts and hypotheses to ex-
plain away evidence disconfirming the positive
heuristic (Lakatos 1974).
Lakatos developed the notions of a negative
and a positive heuristic in research programs in
the context of a still ongoing debate on the growth
of scientific knowledge and its problems of verifi-
cation and confirmation. These matters are ad-
dressed in subsequent sections. In this section, I
develop a hard core of concepts and assumptions
inherent in a public choice analysis of natural
resources management; in Section 2, I attempt to
justify the concepts selected for the- hard core of
public choice analysis.
Hard Core Concept 1:
The Nature of the Good
Any analysis of natural resources policy, or in-
deed of any public policy, must come to terms
with the technical nature of the policy in question.
Natural resources, the non-human endowments
of the world, are found in abundance or scarcity
in any one place and at any one time. Any single
natural resource, be it a physical resource like ox-
ygen or a biological resource like a benthic in-
vertebrate, is therefore a constraint or an oppor-
tunity for human and social activities.
Natural resource goods may be valued in dif-
ferent degrees and ways. Human and social ac-
tivities may exhaust a particular resource in one
part of the world, like removing the seams of a
coal mine, or they may replenish or regenerate a
resource, like re-aerating a lake displaying
eutrophication. We may use a resource, like a
marine park, for enjoyment in its natural state.
Further we may attempt to accommodate all of
these uses of resources-for production of inter-
mediate and end products as well as for direct
consumption and enjoyment-over time and over
geographic space. The art of managing natural
resources is such an accommodation.
An analysis in depth of natural resource
management takes into account four central
characteristics of resources:
Type of Resource. Any portion of land, water,
or air contains a large number of physical,
chemical, and biological properties which deter-
mine its type. The slowly accumulating nodules to
be found on parts of the ocean floor contain, for
example, manganese, which poses different
management problems in extraction, processing,
and disposal of residuals than does a fugitive
792 The American Political Science Review
resource like salmon, which similarly has to be ex-
tracted, processed, and have its organic residuals
disposed of before it is consumed.
Abundance of Resource. The physical endow-
ments of the natural world are distributed uneven-
ly over space and time in terms of the uses to
which they may be put. Clean water available for
direct human consumption is an obvious example.
The relative scarcity of many minerals, such as
petroleum, and the increasing scarcity of many
non-renewable minerals, is a theme that domi-
nates current scientific and social science thinking
(for example, The Limits to Growth debates).
Knowledge about the physical endowments of the
world is uncertain, however, and often a function
of the commercial value of the particular resource
that is being exploited. There is a wide variation in
the estimates and even methods of estimation of
the chemical composition of the earth's crust
(Smith and Krutilla 1979). There is comparable
dispute about the levels of biological diversity,
productivity, and irreversibility that may con-
strain social activities. Uncertainty about the scar-
city of a resource is therefore a dimension of
natural resource management.
Technologies for Exploiting and Managing a
Resource. The feasibility of using any natural
resource for production or direct consumption or
both is partly a function of available technology.
The feasibility of recycling residuals or returning
residuals to the natural environment in a benign
state also depends on available technology. Not
only the type of resource that may be used, but
also the abundance of a resource, is determined
partly by available technology. For example,
electric-sonor technology has made possible the
exploitation of fugitive marine fishing stocks, but
the technologies for managing the productivity of
such stocks are inadequate (Larkin 1979, Sproule-
Jones 1981).
Interdependencies among Resources. The use
of any one resource may create positive, negative,
or unknown consequences on other resources.
The transportation and storage of sawlogs on a
river produces leachates as well as oxygen-
consuming debris, for example, and escaped saw-
logs may have consequences for navigation,
recreation, and other uses of the water resource.
The magnitude of such physical interdependencies
will vary from site to site, and over time, with
often uncertain effects.
These are the four critical, technical dimensions
of natural resources. Public choice conceptualizes
these four critical dimensions of goods in terms of
their "publicness" and their externalities. These
concepts are borrowed from economics, although
their formalization occurred almost concurrently
with the publication of some of the classics in
public choice, such as Downs (1957) and Olson
Vol. 76
(1965), and much of their subsequent refinement
has been made by scholars associated with the
public choice field.
Many natural resources are goods that are
public in nature, namely their use remains avail-
able to others after one person has used the
resource, and potential users cannot be excluded
from using the resource. This so-called availabil-
ity of a resource is determined partly by its abun-
dance and partly by technologies for exploitation.
The exclusive character of a resource is also af-
fected by technological considerations. For exam-
ple, the forests of the Pacific Northwest and of
British Columbia could be conceptualized in the
early nineteenth century as public goods. They
seemed sufficiently abundant to avoid congestion
for all potential users, and the use of horse and
steam power equipment, in the absence of well-
defined and enforced property arrangements,
made entry relatively cheap. The same forests in
the latter half of the twentieth century are farmed,
with some uncertainties, within the limits of sus-
tainable physical yield, with technologies applied
to increasing the biological productivity of forests
and to improving access to mountaintop stands.
Exclusion is now feasible through the develop-
ment of a variety of private property and land
tenure legal systems. The use of forests for saw-
logs and pulp chips is no longer a public good.
Owing to their technical nature, natural resources
can be public goods if particular kinds of property
arrangements are absent.
Interdependencies between natural resources
are conceptualized as potential externalities. In
the previous example, the use of forests for wood
products can affect other uses. These conse-
quences can sometimes be beneficial, or yield
potentially positive externalities, as in increasing
deer stocks for hunting or developing logging
roads for certain forms of outdoor recreation.
Consequences can also be potentially negative, on
bear stocks, for example, or on soil erosion
(without appropriate silvaculture practices).
These interdependencies or potential externalities
can become actual externalities if they are not
taken into account by the users of a resource.
In sum, public choice concepts of the public-
ness of goods and of externalities can be sys-
tematically used to analyze natural resources. The
four critical dimensions of any resource will affect
the precise applicability of these concepts.
Hard Core Concept 2:
Institutional Arrangements
Institutional arrangements are the laws, regula-
tions, and rules for making laws and regulations
that grant opportunities and constraints for in-
dividuals and corporate bodies in both the private
1982 PublicChoiceTheoryand NaturalResources
and public sectors. Public choice analysis, using
concepts developed initially in institutional
economics, refers to such institutional arrange-
ments as property rights, duties, liabilities, and
exposures. Grand concepts in political theory, like
"the state" or "federalism," can be systematic-
ally re-analyzed as particular structures of institu-
tional arrangements.
There are two fundamental attributes of pro-
perty rights for public choice analysis. First, such
rights are solely instrumental means for improving
human welfare, and as such, they have no intrin-
sic value. For example, there is no intrinsic value
in either the private market or public sector ac-
tivities. The institutional arrangements in society
can be compared in order to determine which is
most conducive to individual welfare. Second,
any structure of rights creates burdens as well as
benefits. There are no such things as costless in-
stitutional arrangements; alternative property
rights structures can be posed, devised, and im-
plemented. The task is to compare alternative in-
stitutional arrangements for managing goods
(Hard Core Concept 1) in the light of individual
preferences (Hard Core Concept 3, to be dis-
cussed below). This nature of institutional ar-
rangements will be illustrated with regard to
natural resource goods.
Many natural resources have a public good
character. A free running river may be enjoyed,
for example, by a recreational boater who still
leaves the resource available for others to enjoy
and who cannot exclude other potential users
from also enjoying the resource. Unfortunately, a
recreational boater in such a situation may "ride
free" on others who wish to remove snags and
submerged logs. There is consequently an incen-
tive for such hazards to remain, unless means are
found to ensure that all boaters contribute to safe
navigation. Institutional arrangements can be
devised to remove the free-rider incentive. License
fees collected by a government or authorized
group of users is one example of such an arrange-
ment. A bounty on logs imposed by collective
authority is another. A publicly operated dredging
industry is a third.
Many natural resources are of a common pool
character. The lack of exclusion of users from en-
joying a resource creates an incentive for over use
and rapid depletion of the resource that may be
greater than the physical or biological renewal of
the resource. The so-called tragedy of the com-
mons, in which individual farmers overgrazed
common lands because the benefits to each of
them from grazing an extra animal outweighed
the costs borne by all farmers of sustained yields
of grass, is the classic example.3 Again, institu-
3The best known explication is Hardin (1968).
793
tional arrangements can be devised to prevent
congestion.
In addition, the interdependencies among
resources may create positive or negative exter-
nalities. Rivers may be used for the disposal of
some wastes (residuals of resources) that may act
as nutrients for the enhanced biological produc-
tivity of invertebrates and lower forms of biologi-
cal life. They may also be used for disposal of
other kinds of resource residuals, like heavy
metals and chemicals that are toxic to humans,
plants, or fish. In the former case, positive exter-
nalities may be yielded ultimately to the fisher-
man; in the latter case, a fisherman may bear only
negative externalities. In general, positive exter-
nalities are underproduced and negative exter-
nalities over produced because no single class of
resource user has an incentive to consider the
benefits (or costs) of his uses on other classes of
resource users. Institutional arrangements ranging
from the extension of the legal liabilities of one
user to the collective regulation of users can inter-
nalize such externalities.
Public choice analysis of natural resources
evaluates alternative institutional arrangements
for solving public goods, common pool, and ex-
ternality problems in the light of the potential net
benefits that can accrue over time to users of
resources. Three major conclusions are identified
in the literature. First, if a resource is sufficiently
abundant or technologies are available for en-
hancing and discovering more of a resource, it
may be more costly to define and enforce a new
property right structure (whether in private or
public ownership) than to ignore a public good,
common pool, or externality problem. For exam-
ple, it might be more costly to make urban land-
owners liable for the runoff of waste materials in-
to an adjacent river, and to enforce such legal
liability, than it is to allow the negative exter-
nalities to remain unsolved.
Second, where a property right exists, bargain-
ing between users of a resource that has public
good, common pool, or externality characteristics
will yield the greatest benefits to all users in the
absence of the costs (called transaction costs) of
precisely identifying and enforcing rights, duties,
liabilities, and exposures, and making decisions
about bargaining exchanges.4 A fisherman, for
example, could bargain with a riparian landowner
on a stream bank to ensure that minimum daily
flows of water remain in stream for adequate
temperatures and a sustained yield of fish.
4This conclusion of property rights analyses of
natural resources occurred after the publication of
Coase's seminal article in 1960. The study still domi-
nates subsequent property rights analyses of resource in-
terdependencies.
794 The AmericanPoliticalScience Review
Unfortunately, the transaction costs of identi-
fying and enforcing property rights and of making
decisions with large numbers of users of a
resource are typically great. Substantial uncertain-
ty always is present in estimating the abundance
of and interdependencies between resources, and
substantial difficulties may occur in securing
agreement between users (itself subject to the free
rider problem) and in limiting use of a common
pool. As a result, collective action through
government may yield greater net benefits.
The third major conclusion is that collective ac-
tion itself is subject to particular kinds of costs.
On the demand side for collective action are costs
associated with signalling the extent and intensity
of user preferences as well as with aggregating and
representing these preferences (see below, Hard
Core Concept No. 3). On the supply side of col-
lective action are the administrative costs of im-
plementation and coordination as well as wasted
resources associated with possible monopolies.
In short, public choice analysis anticipates that
alternative institutional arrangements for manag-
ing natural resources will all be costly, and that
the fundamental task of analysts is to compare
alternatives among property right structures to
find the least disadvantageous means to accom-
modate the variety of resource users.
Hard Core Concept 3: Individualism
Public choice analysis assumes that decisions
made in both public and private arenas are made
by individual citizens, individual public officials,
or individual representatives of collective and cor-
porate bodies. Decisions made in society can
always be disaggregated into decisions made by
individuals alone or interacting with others. Two
attributes of this methodological individualism
distinguish it from mere psychologism. First, the
decisions made by individuals are not simply
determined by their preferences. Individuals make
choices in the light of their own perceptions and
incentives structured by institutional arrange-
ments. Second, the outcomes of decisions made
within institutional arrangements are evaluated in
terms of their impacts on individual citizens, not
in terms of their effects on aggregate concepts
(like a society, nation, or group), nor in terms of
their effects for public officials and representa-
tives of corporate and collective bodies. Both of
these attributes are illustrated for natural
resources.
In a common-pool situation marked by an
absence of a property right structure limiting ex-
ploitation of a resource, any individual has an in-
centive to ignore the social costs of resource
depletion for fear that other individuals will cap-
Vol. 76
ture the benefits of the resource before he can.
Studies of North American Indian bands indicate,
for example, that these bands abandoned a sus-
tained yield management of beaver resources
when they were no longer capable of excluding the
white trapper in the nineteenth century (Stroup
and Baden 1980). Their preferences for hunting
and trapping in a changing property right struc-
ture changed their behavior. Institutional arrange-
ments altered the incentive structure in which they
made decisions.
A second example of how institutional arrange-
ments create incentives and disincentives for the
behavior of individuals in resource decision mak-
ing is government enforcement of effluent stan-
dards on point sources of environmental pollu-
tions. Effluent standards are used even when
knowledge of the consequences of such an exter-
nality are predictable-organic wastes, for exam-
ple, in a turbulent river-and alternative institu-
tional arrangements, like pollution taxes or auc-
tions of disposal rights, would be more efficient.
The reason is that the benefits and costs of an effi-
cient property rights change are unevenly dis-
tributed between the polluter and the individual
citizen. Active participation and influence on the
part of most individuals carries transaction costs
greater than the benefits for any one individual of
efficiently internalizing an externality. For most
point source polluters, the benefits are greater
than the costs. Changes in institutional arrange-
ments, like a statutory right to class-action suits,
are designed to reduce transaction costs for some
citizen-consumers and thus to alter the distribu-
tion of benefits and costs and hence citizen
behavior (Sproule-Jones and Hart 1973, Lucas
1976, Buchanan and Tullock 1975, Mumy 1980).
In public choice analysis, resource decision
making is evaluated in terms of its impact on in-
dividual citizens rather than on groups, corporate
bodies, or governments. The value citizens place
on water quality, for example, is a subjective
evaluation that is not reflected in the structure of
market prices for all users of a basin (Sproule-
Jones 1978a, b). Subjective value may not exhibit
a one-to-one relationship with either particular
physical or biological parameters of water quality
(such as levels of dissolved oxygen), or with physi-
cal proxies of output used by management agen-
cies (such as proportion of point source discharges
under effluent standard permits), or with absolute
or relative input variables (like expenditure levels
of government, businesses, or households on pol-
lution control). For example, citizen-consumers
of the water quality environment in the Fraser
River Basin in British Columbia associate the pat-
tern of land uses, such as the location of houses,
high-rises, industrial sites, roads, and transporta-
tion corridors, with continuing deleterious condi-
 1982 Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources
tions of water quality and do not feel that govern-
ment agencies have appropriate management
practices toward non-point source pollution. In
contrast, only small proportions of citizen-
consumers are concerned with the effects of point
source pollution, despite the priority placed on
such concerns by government agencies (Sproule-
Jones 1981).
In sum, individuals have preferences, usually
diverse and varying in intensity, for different uses
of a resource, but such preferences are structured
by institutional arrangements into different forms
of behavior, and the successful accommodation
of the uses of a resource over space and time are
evaluated by individual citizens in their private
capacities. The next section of the paper justifies
the selection of the hard core concepts, describes
their coming together in public choice theory, and
shows how they apply to natural resource
management.
Theory
The hard core concepts come together with
auxilary concepts to form a network of proposi-
tions about natural resource management, or in-
deed other policy areas. The key to understanding
the theory is understanding the relationship
among the hard core concepts. One must consider
the nature of the good before one can draw con-
clusions about the associations between institu-
tional arrangements and individualism. Further,
one must consider institutional arrangements to
understand the relationship between individuals
and goods, and one cannot understand this rela-
tionship without considering citizen preferences.
The interlocking nature of the hard core is
something not fully appreciated by philosophers
of science, which has led to misplaced criticism by
social scientists working outside the paradigm. In
this section, the interlocking nature of the hard
core concepts is demonstrated by describing the
kinds of conclusions about natural resources
which would be reached if the hard core were
missing each of the hard core concepts in turn.
Were the hard core to delete the nature of the
good, the conclusions would fit mainstream
political science. Were individual preferences to
be deleted, mainstream public administration
would ensue. And were institutional arrangements
to be deleted, mainstream economics would be the
result. This interdependence of the three concepts
justifies their selection as the hard core of public
choice analysis.
795
Withoutthe Natureof the Good:
MainstreamPoliticalScience
A river basin typically has multiple uses. In-
streamuses may includeshippingand navigation,
recreationalboating and swimming,commercial
and recreationfisheries, and waste disposal, for
example.On-the-landuses mayincludewatersup-
ply for irrigation,industrialcooling, anddomestic
consumption.Other possible uses include shore-
line sites for docking, marinas,recreation,wild-
fowl, fishery feeding, and houses and cottages.
Positive and negative externalitiesmay exist be-
tween one or more of these uses, and some uses
may display the characteristicsof public goods
and common pools. The water quality of the
river, for example,may be deterioratedby some
uses such as the disposalof toxic wastes, but un-
disturbedby others,suchas pristineformsof out-
door recreation.Some riversare of sufficientsize
and turbiditythat the waterqualitymaynot suffer
from the congestionand type of use likelyto turn
a riverfrom a publicgood into a common pool.
A critical difference between a public choice
analysis and a political science analysis of the
multipleuses of a riverbasinis in the scaleor unit
of analysischosen for scrutiny.The basic unit of
analysis for public choice, called a provision
system, consists of all of the individual, cor-
porate, and governmentalusers as well as the
regulatorsof users of the resource(Gregg 1974;
Sproule-Jones1978b, 1981).The boundariesof a
provisionsystemmay or may not correspondwith
the territoriallegal boundariesof a singlegovern-
ment. Indeed, a provisionsystemis most unlikely
to coincidewith a singlejurisdiction(Kneeseand
Bower 1968;Klevonickand Kramer1973),owing
to the natureof the good and the numberof and
interdependenciesamong its uses. One expectsto
find a large number of individualsand a large
numberof locally, regionally,nationally,and in-
ternationally owned corporations and groups
jointly involvedin the productionand consump-
tion of one or moreuses of the basin. One also ex-
pects to find agenciesof government(organizedat
local, regional, national, and internationalscale)
jointly involved in one or more uses, either as
directusersor as regulatorsof other users. In the
"water quality provision system" of the Fraser
River, for example, are over 100 policy actors
from some 54 agencies and organizations, in-
cluding local, provincial, federal, and interna-
tional agenciesof governmentplus local, provin-
cial, federal, and internationalcorporationsand
groups(Sproule-Jones1981).In addition,one ex-
pects this organizationalnetworkto be changing
in complexityover time, as new marketableand
nonmarketableuses of the basin are enhancedor
diminished.
796 The AmericanPoliticalScience Review
An analysis based on the territorial legal boun-
daries of governments reaches differing conclu-
sions about water resource decision making and
the role of institutional variables, as well as on
more generic policy topics (e.g., Ackerman et al.
1974; Golembiewski 1977; Dye 1978). Citizen
preference for one or more uses of a river basin
may be articulated (or remain latent in the case of
public goods and common pools) through
private market and group action, but it may be
voiced through electoral behavior and traditional
forms of representation. Elected and appointed
officials of a level of government may have a
severely constrained impact on resource decision
making; variables designed to indicate the policy
outputs of a level of government are likely to ex-
clude some river basin uses, like private market-
able uses, and include some water uses from more
than one basin.
Analyzing a resource like wheat production and
processing, public choice would predict a dif-
ferent kind of provision system varying in com-
plexity and in the nature of policy decisions.
Water resources and wheat production have dif-
ferent kinds of abundancies, technologies for ex-
ploitation, and interdependencies with other agri-
cultural and land use resources. Generalizations
about citizen and governmental behavior would
be correspondingly different. It would be unlikely
that generalizations about citizen and governmen-
tal behavior within a particular system of govern-
ment could be transferred from the one resource
area to the other. Only a careful public choice
analysis that takes into account the nature of the
good can unravel the extent and significance of
political behavior.
Without Individual Preferences:
Mainstream Public Administration
The multiple uses of a river basin, or of any
other "bundle" of resources found in a well-
defined geographic space, provide an apt example
of the differences between a public choice analysis
of resource management and what might be called
mainstream public administration.
Mainstream public administration recognizes
the problems associated with public goods, com-
mon pools, and externalities. Mainstream public
administration, however, is concerned that the ex-
pertise necessary to solve such problems is in-
effectively applied, that organizational conflicts
may amplify resource interdependencies, and that
governmental agencies with the power to make
and implement resource decisions are not ac-
countable to the general public. A provision
system, with its multiple organizations and
Vol. 76
authority fragmented among its governmental
agencies, is a case in point. A number of public
agencies, each responsible for a particular
resource use, like waste disposal, navigation, or
fishing, may ignore the positive and negative ex-
ternalities among resource uses without necessari-
ly ensuring that functional specializations are ef-
fectively coordinated. The public too is often left
confused because it does not know which level of
government or which agencies at which level of
government are responsible for managing dif-
ferent resource uses, and government levels and
agencies can abjure responsibility for overall
management.
The solution often posed is to move to a set of
hierarchical institutional arrangements. A single
river basin authority should have the powers dele-
gated to it to eliminate the overlap and fragmenta-
tion among agencies, and to coordinate effectively
resource use in the light of public values. The
model found on the Ruhr should be imitated else-
where (Kneese and Bower 1968).
A public choice analysis of river basin manage-
ment suggests that comparisons be made between
alternative institutional arrangements. A frag-
mented provision system is costly, but single
hierarchies tend to be more costly in a number of
ways. First, they place a river-basin authority in a
monopoly position, and public monopolies can be
successfully captured by one or a subset of
resource users, because of the distribution of
benefits and costs associated with demand ar-
ticulation. Second, a monopoly of expertise con-
tained within a single authority implies that
elected officials cannot estimate the real value of
governmental activities, with the consequence of
inflated budgets and overregulation, the so-called
Niskanen hypothesis (Niskanen 1971). Third, the
number and complexity of resource interdepen-
dencies may ensure that any river-basin authority
is of such size that control from the top of the
hierarchy is dissipated, and that managerial dis-
economies of scale will issue in a lack of coordina-
tion and agency "free enterprise" (Tullock 1965).
The fragmented authority found in typical pro-
vision systems does not, by definition, contain
such disadvantages of monopoly, and empirical
evidence on the Fraser River indicates that (a)
there is substantial coordination within the provi-
sion system, (b) this coordination is not sporadic
and unplanned, and (c) it takes place both across
and within government and the privately owned
sectors (Sproule-Jones 1980). Citizen preferences
for different resource uses may be better articu-
lated and traded through a multiplicity of political
access points combined with market prices rather
than through concentrated political authority.
The Fraser model is more appropriate than the
Ruhr (Sproule-Jones 1978b).
1982 Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources
WithoutInstitutionalArrangements:
MainstreamEconomics
Mainstream economics recognizes market
failurewhen pricesfail to signal, or signalinade-
quately, the value that citizen consumers may
place on certainresourceuses, and the value that
producersof commodities (involving resources)
may place on their form of productionand pro-
cessing rather than on another form. Market
failures and weaknesses include private sector
monopolies,publicgoods, common pools, exter-
nalities, and so-calledequity or income distribu-
tion concerns.The role of the state is to correct
for such marketfailuresand weaknesses.In this
regard,mainstreameconomicsdoes not appearto
differ greatlyfrom public choice.
The case of the multipleuse of resources,how-
ever, illustratesthe differencesbetween the two
kinds of analyses.Mainstreameconomicanalysis
of multipleuse is based on the premisethat the
costs to any single class of resourceusers should
be balancedagainst the benefits to those users.
For short-runpricingdecisions, it means that a
varietyof market-likemechanismsshould be in-
troduced by the private or public sector pro-
prietorsof a land, air, or watersite. The mecha-
nisms includeuser fees, transferablelicensesand
permits,and bonus bids. Any user will then have
an incentiveto use a resourceonly to the degree
that his satisfactionis equalto or greaterthan the
satisfactionhis use forcesothersto forego (Walter
1978). For long-runinvestmentdecisions, public
or private sector facilities should be introduced
only if the aggregatebenefitsto all resourceusers
exceed the aggregatecosts over a specified time
horizon.The criterionof evaluationis utilitarian;
net benefitsshould be maximizedover all uses.
The implication of such an analysis for the
nature of institutionalarrangementsis that the
publicsectoris both an "ethicalobserver"in that
it can estimateand aggregatenon-marketvalues
with marketableones, and also a monopolistthat
can implementthe appropriatepricingand invest-
ment decisions(Sproule-Jones1972).
In contrast,a publicchoice analysisarguesthat
the propertyright structurein any society will
create benefits and costs for different resource
uses (marketableand non-marketable)with dif-
fering consequencesdependingon the nature of
the good. Moreover,the propertyright structure
for resourceusersis also a dependentvariableof
those other institutionalarrangementsgoverning
the operationof the "state." One would antici-
pate, for example, a different distribution of
benefitsand costs and a differentmix of resource
uses if commercialfishermenwere given a statu-
tory property right for the protection of fish
habitat rather than if such rights were the ex-
797
clusive preserve of the riparian landowner or ten-
ant. Also, such a change in property rights would
indicate that commercial fishermen and their
allies were more successful than riparian land-
owners and tenants in exploiting the institutional
arrangements under which statutory changes are
enacted.
The above arguments show that the three hard
core concepts of a public choice analysis are all
necessary components of the paradigm. Although
public choice analysis draws on work in political
science, public administration, and economics, it
represents a form of analysis distinct from con-
ventional or mainstream thinking in those disci-
plines. One cannot draw any conclusions about
natural resources management without consider-
ing all three concepts: the nature of the resource
under scrutiny, the institutional arrangements for
management, and the differing citizen-consumer
preferences for differing uses of the resource.
Animating Principle of Public Choice
Concepts like the hard core concepts of public
choice can normally characterize the properties of
particular empirical elements. Concepts have a
descriptive function: the concept of a public good
characterizes, for example, certain properties in
the nature of resources. Concepts also have theo-
retical significance, however; they are used in one
or more propositions to explain the relationships
among sets of empirical elements. My examples in
the previous section illustrate how concepts about
the nature of the resource, institutional arrange-
ments, and the choice behavior of individuals are
related together to form an understanding of
resource use and exploitation.
In this section I explore and illustrate the theo-
retical significance of public choice concepts with
reference to natural resources and argue that the
network of public choice propositions is dis-
tinguished by logically consistent interrelations.
Further, I propose that this logical consistency is
the impetus behind the public choice paradigm
which expands the range of analysis into different
policy arenas and different social science dis-
ciplines.
Logical Consistency
Logical consistency refers to the way in which
the propositions of public choice analysis are in-
terrelated. They are interrelated such that no con-
clusion drawn from one set of propositions in the
analysis contradicts another conclusion drawn
from a different set. The propositions conform to
the rules of logic, where logic refers to purely for-
798 The AmericanPoliticalScience Review Vol. 76
mal relations and does not connote anything cur Olson's 1965 classic, The Logic of Collective
existential. Action, is a good example. The two structural
The contradiction between the standard of characteristics of a public good were extended to
Pareto optimality and the welfare loss associated the nature of group action, yielding conclusions
with the collective provision of a public good is an about the free-rider incentive which can operate
example of logical inconsistency. Pareto optimal- within groups as it can operate within a market
ity, which states that any policy change is an im- economy. The propositions yielded predictions
provement if it makes at least one person better about a new class of events previously not thought
off and no one worse off, is a standard used in about in such terms.
conventional welfare economics to evaluate Two possible objections may be raised against
market decisions. It is not applicable to, and is the thesis that logical consistency is the necessary
contradicted by, the concept of a welfare loss component of public choice analysis. First, it
associated with collective provision of a public might be objected that the analysis consists of
good, because except under extreme assumptions, establishing connections between facts that are
such as identical consumer preferences or a substantively interesting. For example, it might be
perfectly discriminating monopolist, the tax costs suggested that natural resource management is
will exceed the benefits of a public good for at subject to public choice analysis because of an in-
least one consumer. Public choice analysis has terest in seeing what difference institutional ar-
responded to such contradictions by developing rangements make in resource use and exploita-
alternative standards, such as institutional fair- tion. However, natural resource management has
ness or a mutually agreed social contract to ap- been made the subject of intense scrutiny by
praise both market and nonmarket outcomes. scholars in economics, political science, and
The criterion of logical consistency among its public administration, among other fields, and
propositions has two major implications for the the hard core concepts have been developed at
public choice analysis of natural resource manage- least in part by scholars in these different fields.
ment. First, the analysis rationalizes the existing Were public choice not characterized by logical
state of resource use, exploitation, and manage- consistency as a necessary part of its methodol-
ment. Second, the analysis leads to the logical ogy, it would have nothing to add to disciplinary
deduction of conclusions in areas previously not work. It is the attempt to combine such hard core
subject to public choice analysis.' concepts in a network of logically consistent
A deductive-nomological explanation consists propositions, and to eliminate the contradictions
of an explanandum, or the set of events to be ex- found in work in these separate disciplines, that
plained, and an explanans, or the determining gives public choice analysis its rationale.
conditions and covering laws that account for the A second possible objection might be that
explanandum. An explanans that includes the logical consistency is a result of broader theo-
covering law "if exclusion of fishermen is very retical and epistemological assumptions inherent
costly, then fishing stocks will be depleted" will in public choice analysis. This objection holds
explain or account for diminished fishing stocks that since logical consistency is a necessary ele-
in a particular natural environment, other things ment of all theory, it is the epistemological nature
being equal. Or to put the matter the other way of public choice that makes it a distinct form of
around, the existence of diminished fishing stocks analysis. Such a claim will be refuted in the next
can be rationalized with the covering law in ques- section, where it is argued that public choice
tion. There may, of course, be other covering laws analysis is open to a number of rival epistemolo-
that could adequately explain the diminished fish- gies; no single epistemology is "stamped" as that
ing stocks, such as a loss of habitat, fish disease, of public choice, and no single epistemology, such
or more productive technologies for catching fish, as logical empiricism, is accepted that would pre-
but the criterion of logical consistency offers in scribe the criterion of logical consistency.
and of itself no solution which one would apply to As the necessary component of public choice,
the case in hand. Any single proposition used as a logical consistency may be the source of its im-
covering law in an explanans is a rationalization petus.
of existing events.
Logical consistency is also a mean whereby one
or more covering laws can be applied to areas The Impetus of Public Choice
previously not part of the scope of analysis. Man-
The search for logical consistency among
propositions about natural resources or other em-
5Theepistemologicaland normativeimplicationsof pirical conditions is the impetus behind public
logical consistencyand the hard core concepts are ex- choice analysis. Moreover, the search is never
ploredin the fourth section. completed, because new theoretical concepts are
1982 PublicChoiceTheory and NaturalResources 799
developed and new applications are found for the ments. In other words, higher level propositions
analysis. containing the concept of constitutional arrange-
In the first place, any covering law used as a ra- ments offer a rational (in the sense of logically
tionalization of existing empirical conditions may consistent) justification for lower level covering
be challenged by alternative propositions that can laws containing the hard core concept of institu-
predict equally well similar conclusions about the tional arrangements.
empirical world. The argument that pollution This methodological process can continue ad
regulatory agencies are captured by those whom infinitum. More and more logically consistent
they are designed to regulate may be deduced as propositions can be posed as higher level ra-
easily from public choice propositions about the tionalizations for lower level propositions. For
relative benefits and costs of active participation example, the concept of constitutional arrange-
on the part of the polluters and the general public, ments has stimulated extended theoretical reason-
as it may be from, for example, neo-Marxian ing about the nature of constitutions by re-
propositions about an identity of interests be- examining social contracts, anarchy and the emer-
tween polluters and their elected or appointed gence of constitutions, obligation and consent
"class factions." with constitutional regimes, and liberty and politi-
Public choice analysis does not respond to such cal order. The works of Rawls (1971), Nozick
a theoretical challenge to its rationalizations by (1974), and Hayek (1973, 1976, 1979) are some of
crucial hypothesis testing (Popper 1968), nor does the more frequently analyzed philosophic tracts.
public choice resort to an "instrumental fic- Logical consistency contains its own impetus.
tionalist" view of theory building in which its Similar consequences are found, in the second
covering laws containing theoretical concepts are place, when the covering laws of public choice are
never independently verified (Friedman 1953; applied to different empirical arenas. The concept
Davis 1969). Instead, public choice searches for of a service provision system, for example, was
new theoretical concepts that can form higher initially developed from a study of the California
level propositions which can, in turn, rationalize water industry (Ostrom and Ostrom 1965) and
its covering law or laws. Such higher level propo- used as one organizing concept in studies of polic-
sitions can explain away the apparent inconsis- ing carried out by the Workshop in Political
tency between a lower level rationalization and an Theory and Policy Analysis (Ostrom, Parks and
alternative covering law (Lakatos 1974). In other Whitaker 1978). It was then applied to estuarine
words, the criterion of logical consistency is used water quality management (Sproule-Jones 1978a,
to generate a more extensive theoretical frame- b, 1981), where the nature of the good neces-
work of propositions. An example is again in sitated a number of modifications and elabora-
order. tions of the concept. For example, estuarine water
The concept of constitutional arrangements is quality is important to certain fish and wildfowl
frequently invoked to explain away inconsisten- species that migrate over thousands of miles.
cies between public choice rationalizations and Recreationists, ecologists, and the commercial
alternative propositions posed by competing ex- fishing interests are therefore drawn from large
planations. The concept received its first extended and differing territorial scales which differ in turn
application in the seminal The Calculus of Con- from other resource users like shippers and boat
sent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). It was used owners. In and of itself, public choice analysis
there to account for how individuals would freely contains no auxiliary measurement theory to
impose collective choice upon themselves, or have predict what territorial boundaries, and hence
it imposed because of Arrow Paradox circum- classes of users and potential users, should validly
stances. Necessary solutions to free-rider prob- be included within the boundaries of a provision
lems are acceptable, provided long-run constitu- system. The methodological solution posed in the
tional decisions are based on the willing consent Fraser River study was to use a snowball sample
of every individual in the collectivity. The concept of resource users for one point in time, and
has since been used to account for weaknesses and assume the boundaries of the provision system
failures in institutional arrangements, such as were open because of the nonexclusionary
those allowing the capture of regulatory agencies character of water quality as a public good. This
by those whom the agency is supposed to regulate. example illustrates how the theoretical proposi-
In the case of natural resource management, tions of public choice may be logically and con-
resource degradation or the misallocation of sistently applied to "new" empirical problems.
resource uses among current and potential Logically consistent applications are a necessary
resource users can theoretically be attributed to but not a necessary and sufficient specification of
weaknesses and failures in institutional ar- any empirical verification. The result is that the
rangements which, in turn, can be attributed to scope of potential applications is large, and that
weaknesses and failures in constitutional arrange- the standard of logical consistency contains its
800 The AmericanPoliticalScienceReview
own impetus for including more and more ap-
plications under the deductive power of its pro-
positions. These applications can include subject
matter traditionally examined in a variety of
disciplines. Public choice thus offers, through its
adoption of a standard of logical consistency, the
prospect of continual multidisciplinary studies.
In sum, the hard core of public choice concepts
is defined by the criterion of logical consistency,
and this criterion can account for the impetus of
the approach. Other important methodological
implications of the approach are addressed in the
next section.
Epistemological Foundations
The appeal of public choice analysis would be
relatively slight were it to be based solely on the
logical consistency with which its hard core and
auxiliary concepts are combined and applied.
Public choice analysis would be considered, on
the one hand, as a more "realistic" form of
economics, political science, or public administra-
tion in that it took account of an extra class of
variables in its explanation. For example, it would
have the equivalent position of social psychology
to the disciplines of sociology and psychology.
On the other hand, it would be subject to the
variety of charges against the standard of logical
consistency as rationality levied by philosophers
of science, particularly since World War II. These
charges, made from a variety of premises, argue
that logical consistency is a standard imposed by
theorists on the kinds of causal connections or
supporting evidence or both, acceptable within
the paradigm or within the scholarly community
at large. In natural resource management, for
example, resource scarcity, institutional arrange-
ments facilitating the entry of resource users and
the behavior of the users themselves might be
causally connected in public choice analysis by
propositions about common pool behavior, but
the resource users might not share this causal con-
nection, preferring, for example, one about the
inculcation of an "environmental ethic." Similar-
ly, the kinds of logically valid supporting evidence
for these alternative causal connections might well
differ, and the kinds of logically valid evidence ac-
ceptable to the adherents of the rival approaches
might not conform to the standards of "critical
rationalism" of an ideal scholarly community
(Popper 1968). In sum, were any of these kinds of
charges accurate, public choice analysis would be
merely another analytical approach in the social
sciences, albeit a peculiarly Western and liberal
one.
Vol. 76
But the impetus of public choice is not ex-
clusively grounded in the logical consistency that
makes possible the deduction of new propositions
and the construction of new higher level proposi-
tions to explain away apparent contradictions.
Public choice is compatible with, and open to, a
variety of epistemologies; or to put the point
another way, public choice analysis does not pre-
clude the application of a variety of epistemolo-
gies to its reasoning and proofs. I defend this
thesis by showing how public choice has been
welded with alternative epistemologies, and how
any peculiar normative status of public choice and
its basic concepts is dependent on the type of
epistemology selected or assumed to lie at its
roots.
Alternative Epistemologies
Knowledge claims are grounded in one of three
mutually exclusive sources: experience, reason,
and perception. All three sources are used in
public choice analysis, and all three sources have
been explicitly invoked by theorists.
In the first place, the appeal to experience and
the use of empirical factual evidence as confirma-
tion, proof, falsification, or verification is most
frequently invoked as the source of knowledge
about citizens, institutional arrangements, and the
nature of the good. Thus Plott and Smith (1979,
p. 169) were recently able to write in defense of
laboratory methods in public choice that:
Therewill alwaysbe some aspectof realitythata
designermightsuspectis important,and whichis
missing from an experiment,that might cause
him or herto remainless thanconvincedthat the
results are externally valid.... The bottom line
is that the robustnessof empirical results on
behavioracrossdifferentenvironmentscan only
be determinedempirically.Wheneverreplicable
laboratory behavior has been demonstrated,
then it is entirelyfittingto seek field tests of the
hypothesisthat the behavioris manifestin more
complexenvironments.
This resort to empiricism is taken only within the
boundaries laid down by the theoretical concepts
of public choice analysis. The problems deemed
worthy of investigation and the interpretation of
empirical evidence are theoretically specified.
Davis (1969, p. 36) has written:
If the first role of empiricismis the testing of
theory, the second is the attempt to bridge the
gap between refined theoreticalstructuresand
the real world via the methodof havingempiri-
cists insist upon asking how concepts may be
measuredand theoriestested.
1982 Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources
Moreover, as I have indicated previously, the evi-
dence interpreted in this form of analysis is judged
by the logical consistency of its propositions. This
is an apparent paradox of public choice analysis.
The problems deemed worthy of scrutiny and the
evidence deemed appropriate are theory impreg-
nated; the requirement of logical consistency
among its theoretical propositions allows the
theoretician to interpret empirical evidence as
confirmatory or to explain away apparent discon-
firmatory evidence by developing higher level pro-
positions. Grounding public choice analysis in
such logical empiricism therefore offers security
to the paradigm and renders it impregnable to
assaults of rival theories.
Of course, public choice theory frequently uses
empirical evidence to disconfirm or corroborate
propositions in the body of the theory. Any
potentially contradictory evidence, however, can
be reinterpreted by developing higher level pro-
positions (axioms) to explain away such evidence.
In other words, logical consistency is the mecha-
nism that enables this strategy to succeed. For ex-
ample, the exhaustion of fugitive resources like
whales, buffalo, and salmon is typically inter-
preted as a function of mis-specified property
rights that do not limit entry, the tragedy of the
commons. When property rights that limit entry
are established, and the resultant economic rents
are captured by one group of users, this evidence
is interpreted as a consequence of rent-seeking
behavior on the part of the group. If, on the other
hand, the rent does not appear to be captured by a
group of users, it is then argued that the rents are
dissipated by the agency or agencies that regulate
the resource. That is, one can use either the
Krueger-Tullock arguments about rent seeking to
explain the consequences of limited entry or the
Niskanen (and others) hypothesis about agency
behavior to account for these consequences
(Krueger 1974, Tullock 1967, 1971; Niskanen
1971, Anderson and Hill 1980; Buchanan et al.
1980). It was Lakatos who first pointed out these
kinds of principles associated with paradigm
development. However, most theorists have
argued that the reasons lie in the psychological at-
tachment that theorists have to their paradigms.
The reasons actually lie in the standard of logical
consistency which can be used as a mechanical
device to explain away disconfirmatory evidence.
Most paradigms are similar to public choice in this
respect. For example, Marxism frequently relies
on concepts of "false consciousness" and "bour-
geois ideology" to account for disconfirmatory
evidence. Freudian psychology similarly uses
propositions including nonobservational con-
cepts.
Some public choice theorists do not rely ex-
clusively on logical empiricism as a source of
801
knowledge. Some use reason as the basis of
knowledge. Buchanan and Tullock (1962), who
offered a new understanding of the strategic im-
portance of constitutional arrangements to the
operation of institutional arrangements, devel-
oped their arguments by asking, in effect, "What
form would such arrangements take if they were
to be specified by 'any person' over a risky
future?" A comparable kind of question was
posed by Rawls (1971) for individuals making
decisions in a "veil of ignorance." The problem,
if it is a problem, with such forms of knowledge
about goods, institutional arrangements, and
citizens is that the conclusions reached by pure
reason are sensitive only to the assumptions
adopted by the theorist. Public choice theory,
with its standard of logical consistency, is not
unwittingly prepared to accept contradictory
axioms. As was the case with logical empiricism,
the use of reason as a source of knowledge acts to
maintain the impetus of the approach in the face
of rival political theories.
The third source of knowledge, that of percep-
tions, has also been invoked in public choice
analysis. The most sophisticated version of such
an epistemology in public choice has been offered
by Ostrom and Hennessey (1975), and Ostrom
(1979, 1980), who have taken certain notions
associated with the reasoning of Winch (1958) and
turned them into an epistemology of individual
choice for goods within institutional arrange-
ments. For Ostrom, individual choice and con-
straints on that choice are determined by the
human artifactual system of language. Choice and
constraints on choice are a function of this funda-
mental set of decision rules. A subset of these ar-
tifactual decision rules consists of the institutional
and constitutional arrangements in any society
which order the relationships between man and
the state, and between and among state officials.
In turn, however, the artifactual institutional and
constitutional arrangements, as decision rules, in-
fluence the perceptions of individuals about the
range of admissible choice. Artifactual decision
rules are a consequence of both individual choice
and behavior. The nature of the good is merely a
constraint on this interactive dynamic of society.
Such an epistemology is, like the epistemologies
of logical empiricism and reason, impermeable to
challenge from alternative perspectives. It cannot
be refuted or subjected to disconfirmatory evi-
dence by someone from outside this perspective,
for the evidence and interpretation of evidence by
such a person can be reasoned away as a product
of the artifactual decision rules determining his or
her choice of evidence and interpretation of that
evidence. The impetus of public choice within
such an epistemological framework can be main-
tained.
802 TheAmericanPoliticalScience Review
AlternativeEpistemologiesand
NormativeImplications
All three kinds of epistemologies,those based
on experience,reason, and perception,have been
used as groundsfor interpretationand evidencein
publicchoice analysis.Each exampleabove plays
a double role. Each epistemology provides a
groundingfor the theoreticalconceptsand propo-
sitions and offers a form of interpretationand
verification,but each also insulatesthis form of
analysisfrom potentialrivalsand acts to maintain
the impetusof the approach.It is the criterionof
logicalconsistency,ratherthan any shallowtricks
on the part of the theorist, that renders the
paradigmsecureand impregnable.
This dual role of the rivalepistemologiesprac-
ticedin publicchoice casts a differentlight on the
normativeclaimsand implicationsof this type of
analysis. For if diversity can exist at an epis-
temological level about the theoreticalconcepts
and propositionsof the core of the analysis,then
claimsthat public choice prescribesone and only
one normativeinterpretationabout collectiveac-
tion are rendereddubious.
For example, it might be assertedthat the in-
strumentalassumptionthat institutionalarrange-
ments are merely means for effecting citizen-
consumer preferencesis a decidedly normative
claimaboutthe state. The statehas no rationalein
and of itself, and man is not perfectablethrough
political activities. However, an empiricistepis-
temologymightarguethat the normativeimplica-
tions of such an interpretationwill depend on
whether the assumptioncan generate verifiable
conclusions about the relationshipsbetween in-
stitutionalarrangements,goods, and individuals.
A rationalistepistemologymayclaimthat such an
assumption, along with others, will merely
generateinsightsinto the natureof the state, and
a perspectivistepistemologycould interpretthe
claim that institutionalarrangementsare instru-
mentaldevicesas part of a much broadernorma-
tive claim about the relationshipsbetween arti-
factual decision rules and individualchoices and
knowledge.
As a second example,it might be assertedthat
the assumptionof methodologicalindividualism
represents a normative posture, perhaps of a
peculiarly liberal sort. The proposition that
elected and appointed officials make choices in
the light of their own preferencesand the incen-
tive of institutional arrangementsdenies, for
example,the claim that thereis a widerpublicin-
terestthat cannot be disaggregatedinto decisions
made by individuals alone or interacting with
others. Again, the alternativepublic choice epis-
temologiescan drawdifferentnormativeimplica-
tions about such propositions. An empiricist
Vol. 76
could argue that the assumption is normative only
if it fails to make factual evidence possible (e.g.,
Buchanan 1959). A rationalist could claim,
equivalently, that the assumption merely facili-
tates reasoned knowledge about individuals. And
a perspectivist could argue that there are different
normative implications about the assumption; it
represents one element in a broader normative
position about knowledge, perception, choice and
their relation to artifactual decision rules.
It could be argued that the existence of alterna-
tive epistemologies and alternative normative im-
plications of each epistemology may not deny that
there is a coherent and single normative strain in
this type of analysis, because the selection of the
three concepts as the hard core of the analysis
eliminates the selection of any other candidates
for the hard core, and this is by default a nor-
mative posture. For example, public choice
analysis neatly sidesteps questions about the per-
sonality causes of individual preferences, prefer-
ring to examine demonstrated preferences and
choices within the constraints and incentives of in-
stitutional arrangements; this implies, it might be
further argued, a normative posture about the
value of understanding individual behavior in
psychological terms. The counterclaim to such an
argument is, of course, related to the nature of
theory. Theories deliberately select a subset of all
of the possible elements of the world that could be
used as potential explanatory concepts. If theories
did not make such selections, no knowledge
claims could be made until all knowledge claims
were somehow revealed. Every concept would be
an explanatory concept until it were shown to be
otherwise. But we have no means to tell whether a
concept is explanatory or not if we do not develop
theories. The claim is a tautology.
It might also be argued that logical consistency
as the fundamental methodology of public choice
is in itself a normative criterion. By placing logic,
as a mere technique, at the center of the public
choice approach as the method by which the hard
core propositions are linked together, public
choice theorists are substituting mere technical ra-
tionality for a wider notion of rationality toward
the interests of persons in society.6 But we have
seen that logical consistency does not foreclose
and is compatible with alternative epistemologies
and hence with what could be conceived as the
wider external rationality (Kekes 1976) of
theories. Indeed, the perspectivist epistemology
previously illustrated would imply no empirical or
analytical basis for the argument against technical
rationality.
6This is an application of the reasoning of The Frank-
furt School to public choice analysis.
1982 Public Choice Theory and Natural Resources
In sum, public choice analysis is compatible
with alternative epistemologies, each of which can
act to protect the hard core against rival
arguments. The epistemologies also act to main-
tain the impetus of the approach. Moreover,
alternative epistemologies imply alternative nor-
mative postures about relationships among in-
stitutional arrangements, individuals, and goods.
Although it might appear that more public choice
practitioners are logical empiricists in method and
assumption (see Mueller 1979, for example), the
analysis is open to and compatible with different
normative postures.
It is conceivable that the diversity of epistemol-
ogies within the paradigm could lead to fractious
dispute and dissipation of effort, but until an
unambiguous interpretation of concepts, proposi-
tions, and the meaning of terms is developed, no
priority can be assigned to one or another alterna-
tive epistemology.
Conclusion
Public choice analysis contains a hard core of
concepts, about the nature of the good, about in-
stitutional arrangements, and about individuals.
This set of hard core concepts distinguishes the
paradigm from rival approaches in political
science, public administration, and economics.
The hard core concepts are interrelated by the
methodological criterion of logical consistency
one interpretation of the notion of rationality-
and the criterion accounts for the impetus behind
the growth of the paradigm. The paradigm is but-
tressed and protected from rival approaches at an
epistemological level, and a variety of epistemolo-
gies (empirical, perceptual and "rational") have
been linked to the approach. The congruence of
public choice with this variety of epistemologies
makes many of the criticisms about the normative
implications of the approach inaccurate and mis-
leading.
The type of goods known as natural resources
illustrates the argument. Natural resources are
commanding increasing public attention and
scholarly analysis, but other kinds of goods could
have been used. A public choice analysis of
natural resources is not only a sound scholarly
enterprise but also one that rests on sound
methodological foundations.
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