Perspectives on Public Choice
A Handbook

This five-part volume surveys the main ideas and contributions to the field of public choice.

Dennis C. Mueller (Edited by)

9780521556545, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 October 1996

692 pages, 35 b/w illus. 16 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.9 cm, 1 kg

Public choice or rational politics differs from other approaches to the study of political behavior in that it builds on models in which rational individuals seek to advance their own interests. This five-part volume surveys the main ideas and contributions of the field. It contains twenty-five essays written by thirty scholars, both economists and political scientists, from North America and Europe. Part I discusses the nature and justification for the existence of government and various forms it can take, including mixed, private, and public institutions, international organizations, federalisms, and constitutional governments. Part II examines the properties of different voting rules and preference aggregation procedures. Part III explores multiparty systems, interest groups, logrolling and political business cycles. The individual decisionmaker is the focus of Part IV, with surveys of the experimental literature on individual behavior, and why people vote as they do. The final section applies public-choice reasoning to bureaucracy, taxation, and the size of government.

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 government's share of national income grow? An assessment of the recent literature on the US experience Cheryl M. Holsey and Thomas Borchering.

Subject Areas: Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]