An Economic Theory of Democracy

Fülszöveg

From the Foreword to the paperbound edition by Professor Stanley Kelley, Jr., of Princeton University
This book seeks to elucidate its subject—the goveming of democratic states — by making intelligible the party politics of democracies----
Having given party politics a central place in his thought about democracy, Downs treats it very diflFerently than do other students of politics. His entire eflFort is to account for what parties and voters do. His explanations are systematically related to, and deducible from, precisely stated assumptions about the motivations that attend the decisions of voters and parties and the environment in which they act. He is consciously concerned with economy in explanation, that is, with attempting to account for phenomena in terms of a very limited number of facts and postulates. He is concerned also with the central features of party politics in any democratic state, not with that in the United States or any other single country____
Downs... Tovább

Fülszöveg

From the Foreword to the paperbound edition by Professor Stanley Kelley, Jr., of Princeton University
This book seeks to elucidate its subject—the goveming of democratic states — by making intelligible the party politics of democracies----
Having given party politics a central place in his thought about democracy, Downs treats it very diflFerently than do other students of politics. His entire eflFort is to account for what parties and voters do. His explanations are systematically related to, and deducible from, precisely stated assumptions about the motivations that attend the decisions of voters and parties and the environment in which they act. He is consciously concerned with economy in explanation, that is, with attempting to account for phenomena in terms of a very limited number of facts and postulates. He is concerned also with the central features of party politics in any democratic state, not with that in the United States or any other single country____
Downs assumes that political parties and voters act rationally in the pursuit of certain clearly specified goals — it is this assumption, in fact, that gives his theory its explanatory power. Most of us are such uncritical children of Freud that to say, "He did that because he decided it was the best way to get what he wanted," is apt to strike us as not very profound. Yet, just as firms that do not engage in the rational pursuit of profit are apt to cease to be firms, so politicians who do not pursue votes in a rational manner are apt to cease to be politicians.
I can say quite sincerely that there are few books that have had so great an impact on my thinking, or that I would like so much to have written. Vissza