Abstract

Collective choice has been a topic of research for many years Recent research has focused on individual s trust in government and how a lack of trust can actually lead to an increase in the size of government and as the size of government increases we may again see a further increase in the lack of trust in government Garen Clark 2011 As I thought about this interesting result I concluded it would be worthwhile to step back and look at this issue through the lens of a constrained optimization problem In this paper I solve for an individual making a constrained choice between work and political activity to identify some baseline stylistic characteristics of what may or may not cause increased political activity among individuals