Politics-as-exchange and The Calculus of Consent

Buchanan has always insisted that a central element in the broad “public choice” project, of which The Calculus of Consent is perhaps the classic exemplar, is the idea of “politics as exchange” [PAE henceforth]. In this piece, I want to explore what exactly this PAE conception might amount to. In other words, my object here is to “go back to basics” in a way that Buchanan himself so often did. Much of my treatment here will abstract from the details of the argument in the Calculus. However, I shall at the end offer a conjecture as to how these more general considerations might be brought to bear directly on the analysis of “optimal” collective-decision rules—an analysis that is perhaps the single most familiar piece of the Calculus apparatus.