We examine the political economy underpinnings of import protection in general equilibrium. Starting from a dual theoretical representation of production, trade, and consumption, we map a general representation of the real economy to underlying political processes aka the political support...

Conventional wisdom suggests that compulsory voting lowers the influence of specialinterest groups and leads to policies that are better for less privileged citizens, who often abstain when voting is voluntary. To scrutinize this conventional wisdom, I study public goods provision and rents to...

The application and design of public-private partnerships between the extremes of purely public or purely private task fulfilment in public services is, in practice, subject to political processes. Decisions about PPPs (realisation, arrangement) are taken in the political arena and are therefore...

We propose a dynamic version of the standard two-party electoral competition model adapted to nonlinear income taxation. The theory has a number of desirable features. First, equilibria always exist, even though the set of admissible tax policies is multidimensional. Second, the Nash set can be...

In this note, three major areas of Buchanan's research are briefly described: (1) The ideas of Knut Wicksell on Buchanan's work, (2) constitutional economics and the veil of ignorance, and (3) the role of government and/or the power to tax. It is shown that these three areas had a major...

The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives from autocratic regimes, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. Can censorship be an effective tool to curb the spread of such slanted narratives? In this paper, we study the European Union's ban on...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper investigates this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two coun¬tries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. We can thereby separate an election...

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience find that fictional works exert strong influence on readers and shape their opinions and worldviews. We study the Potterian economy, which we compare to economic models, to assess how Harry Potter books affect economic literacy. We find that some...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical Tullock Challenges. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...