Arbeitspapier
Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Democratic Ideal
In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen's willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes involving log-rolling and lobbying from interest groups. Politicians are frequently criticized for not putting enough emphasis on the cost-benefit analyses when making decisions. In this paper we discuss the extent to which using cost-benefit analysis to rank public projects is consistent with Dahl's (1989) criteria for democratic decision-making. We find several fundamental conflicts, both when cost-benefit analysis is used to provide final answers about projects' social desirability, and when used only as informational input to a political process. Our conclusions are illustrated using data from interviews with Norwegian politicians.
- Language
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Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
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Series: Discussion Papers ; No. 205
- Classification
-
Wirtschaft
Relation of Economics to Social Values
Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
Analysis of Collective Decision-Making: General
Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
- Subject
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Democracy
cost-benefit analysis
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Nyborg, Karine
Spangen, Inger
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
Statistics Norway, Research Department
- (where)
-
Oslo
- (when)
-
1997
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Nyborg, Karine
- Spangen, Inger
- Statistics Norway, Research Department
Time of origin
- 1997
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