A critical assessment of the political preference function approach in agricultural economics
批判性评估了农业经济学中常用的政治偏好函数方法，指出其忽视基本结构导致文献混乱，适合研究农业政策成因的学者判断是否阅读原文。
The political preference function (PPF) approach has been used often in the agricultural economics literature in attempts to explain the causes of farm policy. The fundamental assumption of PPF studies is that government selects levels of policy instruments such that it maximizes a function of interest groups' welfare measures for the purpose of acquiring maximum political support. PPF studies often use the familiar neoclassical constrained maximization problem to measure relative political powers of interest groups involved in policy determination. Some weaknesses of the PPF approach have been discussed in the literature (Gardner, 1989; Alston and Carter, 1991; and von CramonTaubadel (VCT), 1992 **). While each of these critiques provides valuable insight into PPF methodology and its limitations, none of them clearly explains the simple, fundamental structure of the PPF framework. This neglect of certain fundamentals has led to confusion in the litera-