In this interesting, provocative, and troubling book, Peter Self seeks to find a common explanation for disparate political and policy events-the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 in the U.S.; the election of Margaret Thatcher several years earlier in Britain; the attempt to reinvent government at local, state, and national levels; tax revolts, balanced budget amendments, and term limitations-through the application of economic reasoning to politics-or what has commonly become known as public choice theory. Self's book begins with a review of the intellectual history of public choice theory-particularly useful since it is written in non-technical terms, making it a good introduction to the field for the non-economist-but the meat of the book is an analysis of how public choice theory has been used to address a variety of policy questions for the last twenty or so years.

The application of rational models to political events began in earnest in the 1950s with the seminal works by Tiebout (1956), Downs (1957), and Buchanan and Tullock (1962). Such works begin with the concept of self interest and seek to explain political results on the basis of goal maximizing individuals rationally pursuing their own self interest. It is only a short step from this formulation to one which recognizes that government itself is an actor who rationally pursues its own self interest often in competition with the remainder of society. It is the combination of these public choice arguments with economic theories of the market that Self sees as being "... converted into a powerful new ideology which has become politically dominant over the last two decades" (p.56).

In the last five chapters of the book, Self shows how this "new ideology" has been used to justify privatizing different governmental activities (welfare, Health care, other public services), while attempting to reduce the size of government bureaucracy, decentralizing government. These chapters are a mixed bag; in part they represent a review and critique of the policies themselves, and in part they also represent a critique of the public choice theory behind the policy. So, the chapter on downsizing bureaucracy discusses, on the one hand, why governments in Britain, the U.S., and New Zealand have all tried to reduce the size of bureaucracy while also not agreeing that this is necessarily a wise policy, while on the other hand discussing the strengths and flaws of various public choice theories which typically view bureaucrats as budget-maximizing rationalists.

Self's book is also troubling. In part that trouble comes from his view that public choice theory has become an ideology. While his argument that it is an acceptance of the tenets of public choice theory on the part of elites and masses that explains much of the political and policy events detailed at the beginning of this review, one can also find that explanation in such non-rational ideas as decreasing trust in government, perceived disastrous policy effects, and the changing demographics of the American public. From a policy perspective, non-rational theories of policy-making-such Kingdon's (1984) use of garbage can model-can go a long way toward explaining current U.S. policy towards a variety of issues.

In many ways, Self's argument in this book casts him as public choice theory's institutional critic. His arguments, while valid, assume a public choice approach to the topic and by doing so, he opens himself to Robert Abelson's ("Social Psychology's Rational Man", 1975) criticism that the concept of rationality is "too prescriptive, too presumptive, and too preemptive" (p.58). In an era where grand theory is virtually extinct, public choice theory makes the argument that it alone can explain all governmental behavior. While Self criticizes the shortcomings of public choice theory he tacitly accepts its claims-that a full understanding of governmental action is understandable only from a rational perspective.

And last, at the risk of sounding completely chauvinistic, am I the only American who finds his reading of a work slowed immeasurably when that work is written in British English?

Carmine Scavo
East Carolina University