Individual Choice in Voting and the Market

TTIIS paper will compare individual choice in the political voting process and in the market process, with both considered as ideal types. A substantial portion of the analysis will be intuitively familiar to all social scientists, since it serves as a basis for a large part of political theory, on the one hand, and economic theory, on the other. Perhaps as a result of disciplinary specialization, however, the similarities and the differences between these two methods of individual decision-making in liberal society are often overlooked. The state of things is illustrated in the prosaic "one-dollar-one-vote" analogy, which is, at best, only partially appropriate and which tends to conceal extremely important differences. It is necessary to emphasize the limitations of this analysis. No attempt will be made to compare market choice and voting choice in terms of the relative efficiency in achieving specified social goals or, in other words, as means of social decision-making. Many comparisons of this sort have been made. In the great debate over the possibility of rational socialist calculation, the discussion has been concerned primarily with the workability of political decisionmaking processes when confronted with the social criterion of economic efficiency. The issue has been framed, appropriately, in terms of the relative efficiency of centralized and decentralized decision-