Perspectives on Public Choice: A Handbook

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.

Table of Contents:
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.