Compare methods

	Public Choice Analysis	Median Voter Model
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	MCDM	MCDM
Year of origin	1962	1948
Originator	James M. Buchanan & Gordon Tullock	Duncan Black & Anthony Downs
Type	Formal framework for collective decision-making	Formal model of electoral competition
Seminal source	Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 9780865972186	Black, D. (1948). On the Rationale of Group Decision-making. Journal of Political Economy, 56(1), 23-34.
Aliases	Public Choice Theory, Economics of Politics, Constitutional Political Economy, Virginia School Public Choice	Median Voter Theorem, Black's Median Voter Theorem, Downsian Median Voter Model, Median Voter Equilibrium
Related	4	4
Summary	Public choice analysis is the application of the methods of economics — methodological individualism, rational self-interest, and equilibrium reasoning — to the study of political and collective decision-making. Pioneered by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their 1962 book The Calculus of Consent and surveyed comprehensively in Dennis Mueller's Public Choice III, it treats voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups not as benevolent servants of the public interest but as utility-maximizing agents pursuing their own goals within political institutions. A central methodological move is the distinction between constitutional choice — the selection of the rules of the game behind a veil of uncertainty — and in-period choice within those rules. The framework's signature derivation is the optimal decision rule (the optimal majority), found by minimizing the sum of the external costs a rule imposes and the costs of reaching agreement under it.	The median voter model is a foundational result of political economy stating that, under majority rule with voters whose preferences are single-peaked on a single policy dimension, the ideal point of the median voter is the Condorcet winner — it cannot be beaten by any other alternative in pairwise majority voting. Duncan Black established the theorem formally in 1948, and Anthony Downs extended it in 1957 into a theory of party competition in which two vote-maximizing parties converge to the median voter's preferred policy. The model is the workhorse linking the distribution of citizen preferences to equilibrium policy outcomes in democracies.