the constitutional political economy of gordon tullock this paper surveys gordon tullock s contributions to constitutional political economy his first major contribution was his joint project with james buchanan on liberal constitutional design the explicitly constitutional analysis of the calculus was followed by a series of papers and books that focused on the use of resources in conflict including tullock s contributions to the anarchy and rent seeking literatures tullock also pioneered the rational choice based analysis of dictatorships and the relative merits of alternative legal systems topics that has been neglected until fairly recently by most scholars working in the cpe tradition

government growth in the twenty first century public choice explanations of government growth fall into three main categories budget maximization theories rational choice models and path dependent models like the ratchet hypothesis the strengths and weaknesses of these theories as explanations for government growth are considered along with some facts about the actual growth of government to conjecture about its trajectory in the twenty first century government size seems to have been constrained in the past primarily by its ability to raise revenue growth rates in the new century thus appear to depend on factors constraining government s ability to continue to expand the tax base

an empirical example of the condorcet paradox of voting in a large electorate social choice theory suggests that the occurrence of cyclical collective preferences should be a widespread phenomenon especially in large groups of decision makers however empirical research has so far failed to produce evidence of the existence of many real world examples of such and none in large electorates this paper demonstrates the existence of a real cyclical majority in a poll of danish voters preferred prime minister using pair wise comparisons this result is compared with those of a similar poll but by using different voting methods each resulting in different choices the example demonstrates the empirical reality of cyclical collective preferences and the importance of the choice of institutions

the power of the proposal maker in a model of endogenous agenda formation in a distributive setting this study examines a voting procedure for which agenda formation is endogenous it is found not surprisingly that agenda formation is another avenue for strategic manipulation of the voting process and provides the member to first take the floor an asymmetric advantage what is surprising is the degree of this advantage we find that the initial proposal maker earns a share of the fixed resource exceeding 1 for an majority rule and this is regardless of the number of members the voting rule is found to be an effective instrument in at least partially offsetting the power of the proposal maker while maintaining the stability of the voting process

a model of political competition in the underlying space of ideology this study makes use of the concept of ideology to answerimportant questions of political competition i develop amulticandidate model in which voters use ideology as asimplifying device that helps them to choose a candidate in anoisy environment three important results arise for thehomogeneous polity case first the candidate with moreresources is the one more likely to win the election second a merger between two parties might yield to a higher expectedplurality for the candidate of the newly formed party third political convulsion yields to a decrease in the expectedplurality for the incumbent candidate

instability of collective decisions testing for cyclical majorities the issues of cyclical majorities and instability of collective choices have been in the fore front in the discussion of social choice mechanisms cycling lack of equilibria and so called chaos theorems have been prevalent in the public choice literature whether cycling actually occurs in processes that are decided by majority rule has been a long standing question however cycling has not been made quantifiable nor has it been clear how one would determine empirically whether majorities are cyclical in this paper cycling has been given an empirical meaning this paper provides a method to test for cyclical majorities and applies it to decisions made in the us congress the test results indicate stability and the presence of persistent winners and losers in congress

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

the advertising mix for a search good we extend the persuasion game to bring it squarely into the economics of advertising we model advertising as exciting consumer interest into learning more about the product and determine a firm s equilibrium choice of advertising content over quality information price information and horizontal match information equilibrium is unique whenever advertising is necessary the outcome is a separating equilibrium with quality unravelling lower quality firms need to provide more information for a given quality level as a function of consumer visit costs first quality information is disclosed then price information and then horizontal product information are added to the advertising mix some suggestive evidence is provided from airline ads in newspapers this paper was accepted by j miguel villas boas marketing

the stability of logrolling an expectations approach this essay provides an explanation for the existence of stable logrolling arrangements the model presented assumes that issues are voted on one at a time that people are risk averse and that each person forecasts future issue decisions with a random variable whose mean is linear in the alternatives of the present issue we show that under this model the expectation that logrolling will take place stabilizes the logrolling process for this expectation to be stable it must be symmetric which means that revoting of issues must be possible since revoting is possible in institutions such as congress we conclude that an important set of real world voting bodies satisfies the conditions for stable logrolling

pluralism and social choice pluralist political theory identifies certain patterns of political preferences as promoting the stability of democratic political systems and others as threatening to such stability social choice theory likewise identifies certain patterns of political preferences as leading to stability in social choice under majority rule and related collective decision rules and other patterns as leading to unstable social choice but the preference patterns identified by pluralist theory as promoting stability are essentially those identified by social choice theory as entailing instability thus the notions of stability and the implicit normative criteria associated with the two theories are very close to being logically incompatible this incompatibility suggests that the social choice ideal of collective rationality may not be one that we should endorse indeed the generic instability of the pluralist political process and its consequent collective irrationality may contribute to the stability of pluralist political systems

tax shares and government spending in a median voter model pear as a part of political platforms and the manipulation of tax shares through changes in progressivity loopholes writeoffs and deductions is common the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of including tax shares as a part of a candidate s platform within a median voter model in downs depiction of the median voter model two candidates with platforms on opposite sides of the median compete for the median voter s vote by moving their platforms toward the median if tax shares can be included in the platforms another method of competition would be to offer the me

a general constitutional possibility theorem arrow s impossibility theorem shows that there exist no transitive social preferences in nonoligarchic societies for all possible profiles of individual preference orderings similarly a generalization of sen s theorem of the impossibility of a paretian liberal implies under the same conditions that non pareto optimal outcomes may be present in the resulting cyclical preference relations this essay changes the customary perspective it demonstrates that for any profile of individual preferences we can always find a nonoligarchic assignment of rights to different subsets of society to decide between pairs of outcomes together with adequate decision rules which escapes these problems this assignment of rights can be a purely liberal one even for each profile but not one in which everybody participates in all decisions and which uses simple or qualified majority voting total direct democracy the adequate purely liberal constitution on the other hand may imply an oligarchy if too few outcomes are present

stability and centrality of legislative choice in the spatial context majority rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a near core outcome more commonly known as the copeland winner this is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space previous research has not tested the copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core lacking a way to calculate where the copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives we provide a straightforward algorithm to find the copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games we also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the copeland winner finally we show a connection between the copeland winner and the shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the modified power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space

a direct test of direct democracy new england town meetings representative democracies govern most locales in the us making it difficult to compare performance relative to direct democracy new england states however provide an opportunity to test both direct and representative democracy at the local level this article uses revealed preference axioms to compare spending patterns in new england towns and cities against median voter hypothesis benchmarks contrary to previous evidence we find no differences between direct and representative democracy the results suggest that horizontal competition arising from local fragmentation minimize differences between direct and representative local government providing support for wider applicability of median voter based empirical models of local government behaviour in the us

recontracting trustworthiness and the stability of vote exchanges tullock 1981 has recently restated a discrepancy between theory and observation that exists in collective decisions and made a start toward explaining the discrepancy the discrepancy stated simply is this the theory of rational action in collective decisions implies that any outcome which requires vote exchanges to be achieved is unstable in that it can be overturned by a coalition all of whom find it their interest to do so yet a high degree of stability is observed in legislation despite the fact that much of this legislation required vote exchanges in order to be passed tullock accounts for this stability in part by pointing out that defections necessary to create the instability e g a defector induced to become an aristocrat in an inegalitarian coalition create an exposed position for the defector and the possible instability is likely to inhibit the defection in the first place tullock looks at two extreme forms that a winning coalition could take given a set of bills each of which has a special interest for one legislator a logrolling form which encompasses all of nearly all the legislature and a minimal winning coalition although the latter dominates the former in a game theoretic sense tullock argues that the latter will be unstable because of the power of enticement held by the excluded minority logrolling which includes nearly all the legislature is although formally dominated stable because of the absence of this potential enticement thus for tullock if i understand correctly his argument the potential instability of minimal winning coalitions leads any one of them to be succeeded not by another minimal winning coalition but by a non minimal winning coalition that it formally dominates shepsle and weingast in a subsequent paper argue that the institutional structure of actual legislatures restricts the richness of logrolling and coalition possibilities that under pure majority rule without such institutions could overturn a proto coalition or reverse an outcome shepsle and weingast 1981 511 thus they explain stability by stability inducing institutions

agent based modeling public choice and the legacy of gordon tullock the future of modeling in public choice may be glimpsed by examining its evolution in economics for problems that are influenced by heterogeneity of actors social networks or emergence the arising of a complex system from simple phenomena such as adam smith s invisible hand economists increasingly are turning to agent based modeling agent based modeling is a form of computational analysis that focuses on agents rather than on aggregates in his long career as a founding scholar of public choice gordon tullock repeatedly followed the agent oriented approach of methodological individualism many of tullock s models are thus highly amenable to further exploration using that method as agent based modeling becomes more and more popular the importance of tullock s work will continue to grow

equilibrium in fiscal choices evidence from a budget game this is an applied study about the stability of collective decision making in fiscal matters and the features of individual preferences which are sufficient to reach a social ordering it is based on data about citizens preferences collected through a budget game played by a sample of voters in turin a large italian city by simulating a series of individual choices a social ordering of the municipal budget items is arrived at the role played by restricted i e single peaked single caved etc preferences to avoid cycles in choice simulations is then assessed

non global social contracts a note on inefficient social institutions this paper explores some perverse features that can emerge when social contracts are moved from a social vacuum to a setting of social interdependence in particular we note incentives that might exist in conjunction with externality problems that yield situations in which 1 social contracts reduce social wealth 2 sub global social contracts are pareto inferior to the absence of social contracts 3 there are no incentives for global social contracts while previous works emphasized the benefits of contracts this paper focuses on their costs a conclusion reached is that perhaps justice and efficiency demand not a single global social contract but rather a rich melange of sub global contracts with appropriate interstices of anarchy

public choice theory some items for a research agenda to write about the expected development of public choice during the next twenty years is of course impossible for in order to predict the development of the field it would be necessary to know already today the results of future research but then the latter would be unnecessary thus i shall turn to a more modest and rather subjective endeavor namely to sketch some items which might prove fruitful for future research by filling gaps by integrating already existing insights and by extending the domain of public choice i will especially take up in the next section the relationship of public choice theory with constitutional economics law and economics institutional economics and social choice theory following this the relationship of public choice with the analysis of the international system will be discussed section 3 section 4 will take up public choice ideology and information and nondemocratic regimes finally section 5 offers some remarks on the evolution transformation and reform of political economic regimes

why so much stability an optimistic view of the possibility of rational legislative decisionmaking recent formal models of legislatures have proved that equilibrium outcomes are extremely unlikely without either 1 extreme restrictions upon preferences or 2 constraints upon the agenda the implication is that constant instability or dictatorial manipulation is the norm in politics

the median voter model in public choice theory the changing perception by public choice theorists about the relevance of the median voter model is a result of excessive extrapolation of the conclusions of theoretical models to the real world early in the 1970s the median voter model was often accepted as implying that the output produced in the public sector was what was most preferred by the median voter this claim is excessive because the median voter model is only a model of demand aggregation under majority rule and has little to say about the supply side of the public sector in the late 1970s many scholars identified several circumstances under which the model would not apply in theory but these critiques of the model were often viewed as reasons to abandon the median voter model altogether the model went from having excessive claims that made the model appear to be more powerful than it really is to excessive claims that made the model appear to be less powerful than it really is these latter claims were often in response to the earlier claims rather than to the model appropriately applied

cooperation and punishment under repeated majority voting in light of the extensive theoretical evidence suggesting absence of equilibrium in voting models tullock 1981 asks why so much stability our results suggest the following answer political agents engaged in long term relationships can sustain highly stable allocations if there are strongly held norms for punishment of defectors 1

why so much stability one of duncan black s 1958 more important contributions was a classically simple proof that with complex issues and majority voting a stable outcome is unlikely this very simple proof that there would normally be no motion which can get a majority against all others and hence that any possible outcome is dominated by another has been elaborated and made more precise by later work without most improbable conditions endless cycling would be expected this is particularly true when logrolling is present as it normally is if we look at the real world however we observe not only is there no endless cycling but acts are passed with reasonable dispatch and then remain unchanged for very long periods of time thus theory and reality seem to be not only out of contact but actually in sharp conflict it is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that our existing theory when properly looked at does indeed imply a relatively stable outcome to voting in some cases however this stability will not be a true equilibrium because a random member of a large set will be chosen and then that random outcome will be left unchanged for long periods of time it does not dominate all other outcomes but is retained merely because of its particular history there are already several possible explanations for the observed stability in the literature we will take them up as they become relevant to the general line of reasoning i should however warn the reader that my own previous work including joint work with buchanan will play a major role here this may simply reflect egotism but i think that some of the early work which is now partially forgotten can provide solutions for more modern problems much recent public choice work has involved spatial models and these models frequently ignore logrolling the reason presumably is that it is very hard to put logrolling in a two dimensional diagram we shall begin considering such special models and assume that the issues are the sort that does not lead to logrolling and then turn to more complex logrolling problems with respect to the first situation in which logrolling does not occur there is already one possible explanation for the observed stability in the literature

non optimal unanimous agreement in collective decision making unanimous agreement is accepted as a benchmark for economic efficiency because with everyone in agreement on an issue a pareto superior move will result from the issue s approval 1 this view of unanimous agreement is not completely accurate though because when unanimous agreement occurs under a less than unanimous decision rule a situation could arise in which individuals could agree with a majority in order to avoid being in the minority there is an important distinction to be made between a decision rule of unanimity and unanimous agreement under a less than unanimous decision rule under a unanimous decision making rule every voter has veto power and so can vote against an issue to keep it from being approved this means that under a unanimous decision rule nobody will approve an issue unless approval makes the individual better off that the status quo under a less inclusive rule like simple majority rule an issue can be approved without the vote of any particular voter as long as a majority of the voters approve typically the voter s single vote will not affect the outcome of a majority rule election thus the voter faces the more complex choice of being in the majority coalition or in the minority coalition sometimes a voter will be better off in the majority coalition than in the minority coalition even if changes proposed by the majority coalition make the voter worse off than the status quo therefore one would not be justified in concluding that because there is unanimous agreement on an issue everyone is made better off unanimous agreement under majority rule may result from all voters in a majority rule system being better off in the majority rather than the minority even if the change that is unanimously approved is not a pareto superior move 2 the general idea behind non optimal unanimous agreement is relatively straightforward under majority rule a majority has the power to exploit the minority 3 therefore under some situations everybody joins the majority on an issue even though some find themselves worse off when the

the evolution of preferences why sovereign preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it abstract the conventional economic paradigm assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenous to the economic system and that the economic problem consists of optimally satisfying those preferences tastes and preferences usually do not change rapidly and in the short term this assumption makes sense sustainability is an inherently long term problem and in the long run it does not make sense to assume tastes and preferences are fixed and given if preferences are expected to change over time and under the influence of education advertising changing cultural assumptions etc the old assumption of consumer sovereignty is not adequate different criteria of optimality are needed how preferences change how they relate to the goal of sustainability and how they can or should be actively influenced to satisfy the new criteria needs to be determined ecological economics has emphasized the three rank ordered goals of ecological sustainability fair distribution and allocative efficiency this paper examines how preferences evolve and change over time and the implications of this for developing policies that meet these three goals in democratic societies

why so much stability another opinion in this paper i have suggested three important factors that render majority rule stable in real world settings small numbers of alternatives constraints on agenda setters and a meaningful weakening of the single peakedness condition these simple points along with shepsle s complementary notion of structure induced equilibria and an extension thereof incorporating strategic behavior krehbiel 1983 go a long way toward explaining the existence of stable outcomes in the real world

on the stability of legislative outcomes this paper argues that by arranging vote trades in the face of information costs legislative committees contribute to the stability of legislative outcomes a structure of permanent committees and subcommittees facilitates informational specialization and helps legislators acquire experience in their specializations committees arrange vote trades by adjusting amounts of recommended spending on separate items in bills that receive majority support each legislator is allotted a roughly equal amount of legislative spending that he can influence plus an additional amount that depends on his skill and experience as a committee member

what should government do problems of social cost externalities and all that public choice as a field introduced the framework for a methodical economic analysis of political markets the output of these markets of course is reflected by the role that government plays that is specifically true with respect to the organization of economic activity gordon tullock has studied a myriad of aspects of this topic for more than half a century we examine his answers to the question of what should government do and how they have influenced and are still impacting the discussion on the proper role of government in the economy

transaction costs and coalition stability under majority rule 1 introduction under a majority voting rule representatives of specific political districts must bargain with representatives of other districts to build a coalition for enacting legislation that benefits their narrow constituencies but the theoretical public choice literature warns of potential for unstable majorities minimum winning coalitions divide program benefits just among their members creating incentives for those left out to entice defection by offering rewards to those who leave and form a different coalition as noted in mueller 1989 new coalitions emerge undermining the old ones leading to cyclical majorities short term programs and highly skewed distributions of program benefits 1 despite these dire predictions there is a general consensus in the literature such as tullock 1981 that programs are more stable and allocations more equal than the theory suggests 2 in an effort to explain the discrepancy between prediction and observation researchers have pointed to institutional rules and practices in congress for example as stated in shepsle and weingast 1981a and weingast and marshall 1988 the committee system provides a structure induced equilibrium that limits the possible range of vote trading and thereby helps maintain coalitions further shepsle and weingast 1981b miller and oppenheimer 1982 and collie 1988 argue that universalist sharing of program benefits enlarges the winning coalition and extends its political support 3 in this article we offer additional evidence of broad stable sharing in many programs enacted by congress by describing interstate distributions from the federal highway trusts fund htf the allocation formula for the htf was initiated in 1916 but despite wide divergence across the states in growth of various economic factors over the rest of the twentieth century such as vehicle registration and population that might have led to redirection of highway funds there were comparatively limited htf allocation adjustments analysis of state receipts from the htf relative to tax payments into the fund reveals that some states collect much more than they contribute whereas others pay in more than they receive even so interstate ratios of htf apportionments to payments have remained stable across the years varying less than changes in highway use measures would suggest going beyond this specific program we examine overall federal expenditure and tax shares among the states from 1975 to 1997 and show that there has been a similar continuity in the interstate distribution of federal funds and taxes 4 as with the highway program there is broad stable sharing of federal expenditures across the states with some receiving more than they contribute in taxes to the federal government to better understand this observed stability and use of relatively egalitarian sharing rules and to go beyond existing explanations we emphasize the desire of politicians to minimize the high transaction costs of negotiating and enforcing political coalitions politicians have incentive to prevent unraveling of political agreements to avoid the costs of searching for new coalition partners reaching agreement on the nature and distribution of program benefits and costs and verifying compliance these activities detract from a legislator s ability to address other voter concerns moreover legislators seek to protect constituent benefits accruing from long term programs that would be lost if coalitions unraveled 5 accordingly we argue that politicians assemble greater than minimum sized coalitions to build broad political support for their legislative programs offering benefits to a larger constituency in exchange for additional votes considerable negotiation over the distribution of program benefits a nd costs may be required so that once agreements are reached politicians will be loath to consider a major reallocation that could undermine the coalition

the intellectual legacy of gordon tullock gordon tullock is one of the world s leading economists even more so than chicago s gary becker tullock has extended the rational choice model into areas previously judged to lie outside the realm of economics this essay identifies tullock s contributions to constitutional political economy public choice bureaucracy the law and bio economics the essay focuses attention most especially on tullock s pioneering contributions to public choice including his twenty year editorship of public choice

cycles and instability in politics evidence from the 2009 danish municipal elections social choice theory predicts that political processes are prone to instability or outright chaos yet the evidence that actual politics is dominated by the phenomena identified in the literature is somewhat anecdotal and widely contested in order to systematically assess the degree to which politics is affected by cyclicality or chaos as predicted by social choice theorists we study the outcome of the 2009 municipal elections in denmark this yields a total of 97 cases which allows for a systematic assessment of the frequency of cycling through a large n study evidence of four cyclical results is presented

the size and significance of the pareto set in spatial voting models the size of the pareto set in the issue space of spatialvoting models is a function of the tax prices that voters arecharged when all voters pay lindahl prices for all goods thepareto set collapses to a single point the pareto set can beenlarged by altering tax shares so they are further fromlindahl prices and can be reduced by moving toward lindahlpricing a smaller pareto set moves voters closer to consensuson issues so reduces political decisionmaking costs and makesthe political system more stable

are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the analysis of political competition this presidential address assesses the crisis of the downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical conceptualization of political competition based on a critical review of the literature and on the author s works on content analysis of policy speeches income redistribution politicians quality and political legislation cycles this address concludes that multidimensional downsian models of political competition are adequate to explain policy divergence and points out the serious theoretical and empirical problems that models of political selection have to solve

democracy as insurance explaining the existence and stability of democracies pose difficulties for the public choice paradigm the article argues that these difficulties may be resolved by focusing on the insurance aspect of democratic decision making procedures democratic regimes may be better able than autocratic regimes to provide the inhabitants with insurance against the risk of being subjected to arbitrary suppression from the ruling elite this propensity of democratic regimes may explain the origin as well as stability of such regimes

why so much stability the impact of agency determined stability in this article i have shown that institutionally induced stability models can be expanded to incorporate the role of implementing agencies acting in conjunction with the legislature by so extending stability models inferences can be made on agency behavior as well as on legislative behavior in particular the expanded model can be used to show how the two actors together determine the ultimate location of stable policies coalition building considerations jurisdictional limitations and the other customs and institutional considerations that restrict the legislature s policy space make it possible for committees to produce a stable policy mandate but these stability inducing arrangements do not directly apply to agencies the policy mandate constrains but does not completely restrict the area of the policy space open to the agency thus legislative structures do not in and of themselves induce stable policy outcomes legislative policy mandates are changed and defined by the acts of the implementing agency in its role as a non voting decision making actor in the policy process endless cycling by the agency among possible implementation points is prevented by the agency s organizational goal of a stable environment i suggest then that legislative arrangements acting in conjunction with an agency executive s need to create a certain regular and predictable environment lead to the creation of an agency determined stability

amend the old or address the new broad based legislation when proposing policies is costly if each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods then a subgame perfect nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties 1 no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority 2 instead legislators propose policies that appeal to all members not for fear of retaliation but rather to encourage other members to work on new problems in succeeding periods 3 in succeeding periods no legislator amends the existing broad policy we find an equilibrium with these properties in finite as well as infinite period games

do supermajority rules limit or enhance majority tyranny evidence from the us states 1960 1997 buchanan and tullock 1962 demonstrates that supermajority rules can reduce tyranny of majority problems in a democracy however recent theoretical work by dixit grossman and gul 2000 postulates that this static analysis of supermajority rules may be inadequate to explain political decisions in a dynamic setting in fact supermajority rules may increase the incidence of majority tyranny because of rotating political representation using data from us state legislatures we examine the effect of supermajority rules on different categories of government expenditures and tax revenues during the latter half of the 20th century we find supermajority rules have little effect on general government expenditures and tax revenues however supermajority rules are associated with lower public welfare transfers which supports the traditional analysis of the fiscal effects of supermajority rules