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Social science & public choice are confronted by age-old problems to which there is no fixed solution. This fact is illustrated by an examination of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic work on political economy & modern democracy, Democracy in America (Mayer, J. P. [Ed], & Lawrence, George [Tr], Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Anchor Books, 1969 [1835]). An exegesis of de Tocqueville's main ideas -- especially those relating to behavioral rules, self-interest, & rational choice -- reveals their relevance for today. 28 References. C. Waters

A muddy pool, it is said, can pretend to any depth, an observation applicable to much of the revisionist liberalism now widespread in the academy. Unable for ideological or prudential reasons to accept, say, a conservative, classically liberal, or Marxist critique of modern society, but increasingly uncomfortable with the failure, as it is viewed, of bourgeois democracy, neoliberal system-builders have sought a synthesis of the "best" elements of socialist economics (yielding equality) and market relations (efficiency) within a "genuinely" democratic framework. The publication of Charles E. Lindblom's Politics and Markets is as an important auspice of this trend. Recipient of the American Political Science Association's most prestigious book award and laudatory comment in the journals of opinion, the volume has also sparked reaction in business circles, as in the Mobil Oil advertisement which took issue with Lindblom's analysis of big business' "privileged position" in the governance of the world's polyarchies (i.e., the "crippled" democracies of North America, Western Europe, Japan and related systems).

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be "improved" in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to "lose" consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or "bureaus."

Abstract— The U.S. Bureau of the Budget has the important function of recommending to the President the size of agency "shares" in the federal budget. A major research problem, then, is: what standards and criteria are employed in the Budget Bureau in evaluating the agencies and in arriving at budgetary decisions which affect the positions and missions of the agencies of the executive establishment? One scheme of analysis has suggested on the basis of the Parsonian pattern‐variables that public administrators tend to be specific, affectively neutral, universalistic, collectivity‐oriented, and achievement‐oriented in their evaluations of social objects.To test this hypothesis, the pattern‐variables were related to the operations of the agency, each on the basis of a single qualitative indicator, and applied in survey research conducted among the professional budget examiners and their superiors in two of the Budget Bureau's five examining divisions. The data indicate that, in fact, the respondents tended to be diffuse, affective, particularistic, collectivity‐oriented, and achievement oriented toward the federal agencies with which they deal. Thus they tended (on three of the pattern‐variables) to adopt orientations more typical of the political partisan than of the public administrator, a result which, it is hypothesized, is due in part to the unique relationship that the Budget Bureau bears to the President. The results explain, in part, the insolvable nature of the conflicts that exist between the executive agencies and the Bureau of the Budget.

Less developed countries that have launched accelerated & sustained economic growth are found, on the basis of case-by-case review, to share certain political features, basically varieties of authoritarianism. They also have followed broadly similar developmental policies, including reliance on the market, material incentives, & integration into the global economy. The implications for systems pursuing different development strategies, & for equity & long-term stability, require assessment. Modified HA.