Public Choice

SOCIAL CHOICE, CONTRACTS AND LOGROLLING Part 2 (Public Choice)

5. Negative Externalities and Cyclical Social Preferences In this Section we prove Theorem 2. Externalities are a necessary condition for the existence of cyclical social preferences. Define first negative externalities. Denote bya winning coalition which can decide among outcomes Note that this can either be a coalition which has the right according to the assignment […]

SOCIAL CHOICE, CONTRACTS AND LOGROLLING Part 1 (Public Choice)

The problems connected with logrolling (Bernholz, 1974) and vote-trading (Kramer, 1973; McKelvey, 1976; Plott, 1967) are special cases of much wider phenomena (Bernholz, 1981; Schwartz, 1981, 1986). These phenomena are in fact the only reason for the inconsistencies of non-dictatorial societies described by Arrow’s General Impossibility Theorem (Arrow, 1963/51; see Sen, 1987, for a review […]

PUBLIC CHOICE AND CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Part 1

1. Introduction Public choice – or the economics of politics – is a relatively new science located at the interface between economics and politics (Mueller 1997, and Shughart and Razzolini 2001). It was founded in 1948 by Duncan Black, who died in 1991 without ever achieving full recognition as the Founding Father of the discipline […]

PUBLIC CHOICE AND CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Part 2

5. Rent Seeking and Rent Extraction Rents are here defined as returns in excess of opportunity cost engineered in a market economy by the regulatory intervention of government (Tollison, 1982, 1997, Tollison and Tullock, 1988). The availability of such rents gives rise to rent seeking on the part of interest groups, whose members rationally expend […]

PUBLIC CHOICE: AN INTRODUCTION

1. Origins Public Choice has been defined as the application of the methodology of economics to the study of politics. This definition suggests that public choice is an inherently interdisciplinary field, and so it is. Depending upon which person one selects as making the pioneering contribution to public choice, it came into existence either in […]

ARE VOTE AND POPULARITY FUNCTIONS ECONOMICALLY CORRECT? Part 1 (Public Choice)

1. Introduction During the last 30 years about 300 papers on Vote and Popularity functions (defined in Table 1) have been writ-ten.1 Most of the research is empirical. The purpose of this article is to survey this literature and discuss how the empirical results fit into economic theory. It is my experience that when academic […]

ARE VOTE AND POPULARITY FUNCTIONS ECONOMICALLY CORRECT? Part 2 (Public Choice)

6. Voters are Mainly Sociotropic — Or Perhaps Not Once the analysis of VP-functions moved into micro research, data increased dramatically to allow much stronger tests, but new interesting problems came up. The most intriguing was probably the sociotropic/egotropic controversy, where the two terms are defined in Table 7.14 Like the RP-pairs also ES-pairs exist […]

CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY (Public Choice)

1. Constitutional and Nonconstitutional Economics There is a categorical distinction to be made between constitutional economics and nonconstitutional, or ordinary, economics — a distinction in the ultimate behavioral object of analytical attention. In one sense, all of economics is about choice, and about the varying and complex institutional arrangements within which individuals make choices among […]

CORRUPTION (Public Choice)

Corruption is an archetypal topic for students of Public Choice. It brings together the private search for economic gain with the government’s efforts to supply public goods, correct market failures, and aid the needy. Public Choice’s insistence on viewing politicians and government bureaucrats as motivated by the same economic interests as private individuals and firms […]

DICTATORSHIP Part 1 (Public Choice)

The literature which takes a public choice approach to dictatorship, largely barren before 1990 except for Tullock’s Autocracy (1987), is now growing and may be entering a period of prosperity. This survey focuses on the most recent literature, and on three questions in particular: (1) The behavior of dictators, including the the strategies dictators use […]

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