A Reassessment

The theory of collective (or public) goods has proven of great value to the understanding of politics. Based on assumptions of rational and (usually) self-interested behavior, for political applications one of the central theorems to the theory is that unorganized groups supply themselves suboptimal amounts of any collective good. A number of areas of application of the theory have been ill-advised. In particular, these theorems are not directly applicable to most problems of international politics, if states are taken as the actors. The eager political scientist might feel the positive explanatory role of the theory could be disavowed while the "normative" findings of suboptimality are maintained. But this too will be argued to be fallacious. Indeed, the applicability of the theory is argued to be less grand than originally postulated. Rather than an intuitively obvious applicability of collective good theory to institutions and group activities in general, the domain is restricted to groups which have members whose preferences can be rationally aggregated and expressed by their social decision procedures. Further, the normative claims of suboptimality are shown to have limitations independent of the group's social decision process.