legislative district configurations and fiscal policy in american states in accordance with the median voter theorem the median legislator is decisive in representative democracy if the preferences of the median legislator differ from the preferences of the median voter in the polity fiscal policy choices will predictably diverge from those favored by the median voter this paper seeks to identify the median district and therein the preferences driving the median legislator in american state legislatures using economic characteristics of constituents we find substantial differences between the median district and the statewide median as the income of the median district rises above the median income of the polity government expenditures increase in addition the degree to which income is skewed across legislative districts affects spending for redistribution programs finally we find that direct democracy procedures which allow the statewide median voter to check legislative decisions limit the impact of differences between the district and polity medians

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

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

how elastic is calorie demand parametric nonparametric and semiparametric results for urban papua new guinea this article seeks further evidence on the elasticity of calorie demand with respect to household resources the case presented is for urban areas of papua new guinea where just over one half of the population appear to obtain less than the recommended amount of dietary energy the relationship between per capita calorie consumption and per capita expenditure in urban areas of papua new guinea is not consistent with the view that income changes have negligible effects on nutrient intakes the unconditional calorie demand elasticity is approximately 0 6 for the poorest half of the population using parametric and semiparametric estimation to control for a wide range of other influences on calorie consumption does not materially reduce the size of the elasticity therefore these results are not supportive of growth pessimism and instead suggest that policies that increase urban household incomes will also act to reduce undernutrition

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

programs for the poorest learning from the igvgd program in bangladesh abstract this article examines a program that seeks to reach bangladesh s hardcore poor by combining elements of livelihood protection food aid with livelihood promotion skills training and microfinance bangladesh rural advancement committee s income generation for vulnerable group development program has deepened the outreach of its poverty reduction activity and achieved impressive results detailed local level fieldwork revealed however that program practice differed markedly from program plans this is found to have important implications for both future program design and the understanding of who does not benefit from such innovative programs we conclude that while such programs mixing livelihood protection and promotion should be a major focus for anti poverty strategies there will remain a role for more traditional social welfare schemes

food aid and child nutrition in rural ethiopia abstract this paper uses a unique panel data set from ethiopia to examine the determinants of participation in and receipts of food aid through free distribution fd and food for work ffw results show that aggregate rainfall and livestock shocks increase household participation in both fd and ffw ffw also seems well targeted to asset poor households the probability of receiving fd does not appear to be targeted based on household wealth but fd receipts are lower for wealthier households the effects of fd and ffw on child nutritional status differ depending on the modality of food aid and the gender of the child both ffw and fd have a positive direct impact on weight for height households invest proceeds from fd in girls nutrition while earnings from ffw are manifested in better nutrition for boys the effects of the gender of the aid recipient are not conclusive

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

interest rate restrictions and deposit opportunities for small savers in developing countries an analytical view this article argues that by forcing financial intermediaries fi to substitute implicit interest for monetary interest payments deposit rate ceilings may increase the cost of savings mobilisation especially from non wealthy households this mechanism may partially explain the lack of small savers deposit opportunities in developing countries a simple model is used to elucidate this mechanism as well as the effects of financial technology intensity of competition and external funding on an fi s savings mobilisation operations

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 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

on the difficulty of eliminating deficits with higher taxes some canadian evidence government budget deficits have increased along with government revenues from direct and indirect taxation both in absolute amounts and as a share of national income in canada as well as in several other countries especially since the 1960s this phenomenon also has coincided particularly since 1980 with skepticism over the notion that government deficit spending stimulates economic growth and employment instead many now expect deficits to produce negative effects on economic activity including high real interest rates reduced real capital formation and production increased unemployment and possible long term inflation 2 these expectations have produced a near concensus on the need to reduce government budget deficits but not on the means of achieving that goal some advocate reductions in government spending as the optimal solution while others call for increases in taxation to raise revenue although either policy in principle may achieve the same result for the deficit they arise from different theories of the determinants of government spending in particular those who advocate expenditure cuts suggest that increased taxation would increase government spending more than it would reduce the deficit arguing that there is a causal direction from increased tax revenues to increased government expenditures although the taxation spending causality hypothesis has assumed increased prominence over the last decade 3 little statistical testing has been done for canada studies by manage and marlow 18 and ram 21 lend support to the argument that expenditures are more responsive to revenues than the reverse on the basis of u s data indeed ram s work contradicts the earlier conclu

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

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

precautionary and speculative aspects of the behaviour of banks in the united kingdom under competition and credit control 1972 1980 when deciding upon the balance of its portfolio an economic agent must take into account many different types of risk the most obvious are those about future asset prices and transaction flows which respectively lend the problem its speculative and precautionary aspects this paper develops a model of uk bank behaviour under the competition and credit control ccc conventions which allows for both types of risk and yet is sufficiently tractable to be fitted empirically following previous uk studies we suppose that banks are risk averse maximising expected utility over a discrete decision period and assume that the distribution of asset returns is independent of that of cash and reserve losses in addition we assume that if the precautionary balances chosen by the bank initially are insufficient to cope with outflows of funds during the decision period without infringing the ccc conventions then the bank will face transactions or penalty costs this assumption distinguishes our model from those used in previous uk studies and gives it its precautionary aspects the basic model is set out in section i of the paper it is noted that reserve assets cash and short term money market items have similar speculative risk characteristics so that the banks problem can be separated into precautionary and speculative sub problems the first involving holdings of cash and reserve assets the second involving the remaining portfolio items the resulting relationships are discussed in section ii these may be estimated using simultaneous non linear equation methods the results are discussed in section iii

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

does better nutrition raise farm productivity household level data from sierra leone are used to test whether higher caloric intake enhances family farm labor productivity this is the notion behind the efficiency wages hypothesis which has found only weak empirical support a farm production function is estimated accounting for the simultaneity in input and calorie choice instruments include prices household demographic characteristics and farm assets the latter two sets of instruments are later dropped to explore the robustness of the results to different specifications of exogeneity the exercise shows a highly significant effect of caloric intake on labor productivity providing solid support for the nutrition productivity hypothesis the marginal effect on productivity falls drastically as calorie consumption rises but remains positive at moderately high levels of intake one result is a fall in the effective price of food a decline that is larger for households that consumer fewer calories

the simple economics of bank regulation this paper discusses the effects of central bank regulation of the banking system carried out to control the level of bank lending prudential regulation designed to reduce the frequency of bank failure a problem in the economics of uncertainty and information is not considered the main point of this paper is that bank regulation in so far as it is effective and goes beyond the general effects of government intervention in credit markets can be seen as a tax on transactions intermediated through banks the variations in the incidence and beneficiaries of the tax provide a convenient framework for the different regulatory schemes the paper focuses on the effect of regulation on an individual bank the theory presented here is an elementary comparative static one based on the equality of marginal cost and marginal revenue it does not consider the more complicated issues of dynamic control however it is unlikely that any policy that has unsatisfactory comparative static properties will be successful the main ideas of this approach are due to tobin 1963 and johnson 1967 197 1 they have been further developed in work by spencer and mowl 1978 and artis and miller 1978 however the application of the analysis to the effects of different types of regulation is i believe new a general equilibrium model in the same spirit as the partial equilibrium model used here is given by fama 1980 the following section presents a simple model of the banking system section ii discusses the effect of government intervention and regulation and section iii looks at the way in which government regulation induces disintermediation section iv applies the previous results to consider various actual or proposed schemes in practice the final section draws conclusions

corporate bank borrowing in the uk 1965 1981 the instability of demand for money equations in both the united states and the united kingdom in the 1970s has reinforced the view that money holdings may usefully be viewed as buffer stocks and that observed movements in broad monetary aggregates may reflect supply side shocks predominantly caused by changes in bank lending to the private sector judd and scadding 1981 goodhart 1982 laidler 1983 this paper presents some new econometric results for uk bank lending to industrial and commercial companies iccs the results are consistent with the view that the quantity of bank borrowing is largely demand determined and as such they provide additional support for the view of a credit driven money stock coghlan 1981 moore 1979 1983 the demand for bank credit by iccs appears highly interest inelastic at least within the single equation framework of this paper finally the policy implications of the study suggest that contrary to some previous work during the period considered 1965 to mid 1981 the bank of england was largely unsuccessful in its attempts to control bank lending by discriminatory regulation gowland 1978 artis and lewis 1981

estimating the average treatment effect of social safety net programmes in bangladesh since the famine in 1974 the bangladesh government and some national and international agencies have been providing food or cash or both to poor households through the social safety net programmes i seek to estimate how much these programmes affect the well being of poor households most previous studies have estimated impacts of these programmes on calorie consumption simply computing the raw differential however both observed and unobserved characteristics bias this treatment effect using fuzzy regression discontinuity rd design i control for these selection effects

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

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

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

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

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

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