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To explain public policy decision making, one dominant strain of framework economists has long used is the rational choice theory or its political science analogous, public choice. In this essay I argue that public policy making is not a rational process because the rationality project's unit of analysis—the individual—is not rational; but beliefs born out of ideological, theoretical, and administrative praxis have contributed to creating a paradigm of policy analysis that assumes rationality of agents and in turn feeds into imperfect policy making. Questioning the rational actor model and application of market economy assumptions in non-market decision making, I explore how this neoclassical economics approach and the language of neoliberal market leads to comparability between the political system and the market; and one of the main propositions or anxieties of public choice or social choice theorists is that the state or the political process is usurping market's role as the resource allocation mechanism (Heald 1985). Dubbed as a method to analyse government failures (Buchanan 2003), this view of political process was supposed to be a more scientific than the messy, contested view of policy making process that pluralism offered. However, it is illuminating to inspect the underlying assumptions behind the 'homo-economicus' claim. I argue that limitations of 'rationality' in the political process make it more-than-rational and that the rational assumption or rationality project in public policy analysis feeds into the neoliberal policy agenda with brief examples of imperfect policy decisions.
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