Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in The Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted fieldwork in metropolitan police departments across the United States. Their finding in support of community policing dealt a blow to the popular belief that...

Democratic governments can be either national or federal in form. Whether the form of democracy matters, how it matters if, indeed, it does matter, and for whom it might matter are the types of questions this paper explores. Federalism is generally described as a pro-liberty form of government....

It is common to think of federalism as a governmental arrangement that entails competition among governments. Thinking this way, however, is problematic. A competitive system is generally associated with the notion of polycentricity, as illustrated by a market system of free and open...

This paper explains that James Buchanan's theory of public debt entailed more than the shifting of cost forward in time from the current generation of taxpayers to future generations of taxpayers. The possibility of such shifting is dubious, for public debt really entails a shifting of cost...

Most theorists of public finance treat budgeting as a technical problem concerned centrally with projecting revenues and expenses. To the contrary, I treat budgeting as a political problem, with technical matters serving to obscure more than illuminate the political economy of budgeting. This...

All but one American state has some constitutional requirement for a balanced budget but few of them operate this way. Moreover, in 1979 the federal government enacted a public law that required a balanced budget by 1982. The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....

Political economy is a field of study where theorists typically treat polities and markets as separate orders of activity within society. Moreover, the standard mode of analysis treats those entities as existing in states of equilibrium. To the contrary, this essay treats polities and markets as...

Widespread agreement that a political reform is necessary is no guarantee that it is actually undertaken in a timely manner. There is often a delay before action is taken and reform packages that would be most efficient to implement all at once are often done only gradually. We propose a...

This paper is an introductory presentation before the first monthly meeting of the Entangled Political Economy Research Network (EPERN) Network organized by Marta Podemska-Mikluch from Gustavus Adolphus College and Mikayla Novak from the Australian National University. This paper is not so much...

This paper explores a possible path toward dissolving an antinomy within political economy: market order is treated as emergent and spontaneous while political order is treated as planned. This paper pursues a path that seeks to locate the entire social order as emergent and spontaneous. Where a...