Dennis C. Mueller

Perspectives on public choice : a handbook

1. Public choice in perspective Dennis C. Mueller Part I. The Need for and Forms of Cooperation: 2. Economic theories of the state Russell Hardin 3. Neither markets nor states: linking transformation processes in collective-action arenas Elinor Ostrom and James Walker 4. The political economy of Federalism Robert P. Inman and Daniel L. Rubinfeld 5. The public choice of international organizations Bruno S. Frey 6. Constitutional public choice Dennis C. Mueller Part II. Voting Rules and Preference Aggregation: 7. Cycling and majority rule James M. Enelow 8. Majority rule Douglas W. Rae and Eric Schickler 9. Group choice and individual judgments H. Peyton Young 10. Some paradoxes of preference aggregation Prasanta K. Pattanaik 11. Voting and the revelation of preferences for public activities T. Nicolaus Tideman Part III. Electoral Politics: 12. The spatial analysis of elections and committees: four decades of research Peter C. Ordeshook 13. Multiparty electoral politics Norman Schofield 14. Interest groups: money, information and influence David Austen Smith 15. Logrolling Thomas Stratmann 16. Political business cycles Martin Paldam Part IV. Individual Behavior and Collective Action: 17. When is it rational to vote? John H. Aldrich 18. Voting behavior Morris P. Fiorina 19. Public Choice Experiments Elizabeth Hoffman Part V. Public Choice in Action: 20. Modern bureaucratic theory Ronald Wintrobe 21. The positive theory of public bureaucracy Terry Moe 22. The political economy of taxation Walter Hettich and Stanley L. Winer 23. Rent seeking Robert D. Tollison 24. Endogenous protection: a survey Stephen P. Magee 25. Why does governments share of national income grow? An assessment of the recent literature on the US experience Cheryl M. Holsey and Thomas Borchering.

On the Foundations of Social Science Research

Abstract Is it possible that all of the social sciences could employ a common methodology? If so, what would it be? This article adresses these questions. It takes off from James Coleman’s recent book, The Foundations of Social Theory. Coleman’s social theory is built on the postulate that individuals are rational actors, the same postulate that most of modern economics is built upon. This article critiques the use of this postulate in economics, and thus questions whether it is a useful building block for the methodological foundations of social science research. It proposes an adaptive view of human behavior as an alternative in which preferences are conditioned by past experience. The work of Joseph Schumpeter is discussed as an exemplar of the methodology advocated here.

Economic theories of the state

In rough outline, political economists have contributed to three categories of explanatory theories of the state based on arguments from, respectively, public goods, coordination, and evolutionary stability. The best known of these and the most extensively articulated are theories that build on public goods, in part perhaps because the theory of public goods has long been relatively well understood in a crude form, and in part perhaps because the public goods theory seems to yield not only an explanation for but also a justification of the state. In any case, the long tradition that grounds the state in the demand for public goods and in the states capacity to deliver such goods has been both normative and explanatory. The other two traditions are primarily explanatory and not normative. In its most literal variants, the public goods tradition supposes that people deliberately create the state in order to provide themselves with goods they could not individually provide for themselves, as, for example, by literally contracting to establish government. This bootstrapping move is circular if it is supposed that the state is itself a public good. In frustration at failing to provide ourselves some public good, we merely provide ourselves another that then provides us the one we failed to provide. Although it has not fully withered away and may occasionally betray signs of spontaneous regeneration, this branch of the tradition was finally cut off by Mancur Olsons argument of the logic of collective action (Olson 1965).

Public Choice: An Introduction

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 the late 18th century as an offshoot of mathematics, or in the late 1940s as an offshoot of economics. The case for the earlier date rests on the existence of publications by two French mathematicians, Jean-Charles de Borda (1781) and the Marquis de Condorcet (1785). Condorcet was the first person, as far as we know, to discover the problem of cycling, the possibility when using the simple majority rule that an alternative x can lose to y in a vote between the two, y can lose to another alternative z, but z will also lose to x. The existence of such a possibility obviously raises the issue of how a community can decide among these three alternatives, when a cycle exists, and what the normative justification for any choice made will be. No cycle exists, of course, if some alternative, say y, can defeat both x and z. The literature has commemorated Condorcet’s contribution by naming such an issue like y a Condorcet winner. A vast number of papers and books have analyzed both the normative and positive implications of the existence of cycles.

Constitutional and Liberal Rights

Abstract Amartya Sen has demonstrated a possible inconsistency between a (liberal) right and Pareto optimality. Neither Sen nor the subsequent literature have discussed the origin of the rights that lead to the liberal paradox. In this article I examine one possible origin of rights definitions-a constitutional contract agreed to by all members of the community. Constitutional rights are show to be vulnerable to a similar paradox as with liberal rights, but if the writers of the constitution were correct in their choice of actions to protect, such paradoxes will be unlikely and involve small welfare losses when they do occur. The article demonstrates that both the origin of rights and their potential role in advancing the interests of citizens can be explained using a utilitarian/welfarist methodology.

The State and Religion

Abstract  The proposition that the State should be separated from the Church is well accepted by students of democracy in the West. Huntington ((1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster) went so far as to claim that the separation of Church and State was a salient feature of Western Civilization, which explains why Western countries tend to be democracies, while democracy in other cultures is rare. Huntingtons claim obviously presumes that the State is separated from the Church in Western democracies. A closer look at the relationships between State and Church in these countries, however, reveals considerable financial and institutional linkages between the two institutions. Democratic states in the West subsidize religious organizations and religious schools, allow or even sometimes compel religious instruction in public, supposedly secular schools, and enact laws, which advance religious agendas. This article documents and discusses these state–church relationships. It goes on to recommend the implementation of a complete separation of Church and State.