Communication and Consensus;
A Reconsideration on the Economics of the Political Process
1988 Volume 1988 Issue 11 Pages 13-23
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1988 Volume 1988 Issue 11 Pages 13-23
Political decision making was the exclusive subject of political science and remained exogenous in the analitical framework of economics. However, the recent development of public economics has changed the situation. The social choice approach deals with collective decision making procedures such as the voting mechanism. The public choice approach regards a political decision as a result of rational behaviors of various agents taking part in the political process. These approaches are principal components of public economics, and a political decision is an endogenous variable for both to solve. This seems one of the distinctive features of public economics.
These attempts to extend the application area of economics beyond the market mechanism to the political process have brought out many meaningful contributions. However, these expansional efforts in economics would come to the limit as long as we stick to the conventional framework of economics, wherein the utility function of each unit is presumed to be given and to remain unchanged. This presupposition prevents economics from handling the consensus formation in the political process.
The democratic political process has two stages. One is the stage of decision making or the voting stage. The other is the stage of consensus formation, preceding the voting stage. The latter is a communication process, in which the cognitive system of each decision unit should be supposed to have some sort of possibility of transformation. If there is no room for any transformation, a consensus is no more than another name for a very special situation where all members have the same political opinion by accident.
The cognitive system of a person is considered to be a system of accumulated informations and to keep self-organizing in the flow of information. We examine, in this paper, the natures and the limits of the economics of the political process from the viewpoint of communication and consensus.
