Competition and Structure: The Political Economy of Collective Decisions: Essays in Honor of Albert Breton

The essays in this volume, written by well-known economists and other social scientists from North America, Europe and Australia, share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, inter-level rivalry and reassignments of powers in federal and unitary systems of government, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions or arrangements, and the response of governments and overarching institutions of globalization. The essays were written in honour of Albert Breton, a pioneer in this field of investigation.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon and Ronald Wintrobe; Part I. Trust, Information, and Bureaucracy: 1. Trust and society Russel Hardin; 2. Downsizing trust Ronald Wintrobe; 3. Information and political decision-makers Jean-Dominique Lafay; Part II. Competition and Collusion in Government: 4. Divisible versus indivisible policies: an exploration of clientelistic politics Giorgio Brosio; 5. Founding fathers vs. rotten kids: a positive approach to constitutional politics Gianluigi Galeotti; Part III. Decentralization and Federalism: 6. Fiscal decentralization and Competitive Governments Richard Bird; 7. On the reassignment of fiscal powers in a federal state Stanley Winer; 8. Assigning powers over the Canadian environment Anthony Scott; 9. Art and culture goods and fiscal federalism Francesco Forte; 10. Vertical competition in a unitary state Pierre Salmon; 11. Nationalism and federalism: the political constitution of peace Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin; 12. A political efficiency case for Federalism in multinational states: controlling ethnic rent-seeking Roger Congleton; 13. Quebec 1995: the rhetoric of the referendum Robert Young; 14. Public subsidies for private firms in a federalist democracy Dennis Mueller; 15. Economic constitutions, protectionism and competition among jurisdictions Viktor Vanberg; 16. A cautious view of international harmonization: implications from Breton's theory of competitive governments Michael Trebilcock and Robert Howse.