This paper provides an explanation for the lack of profit-maximizing governments and for widespread use of more or less representative forms of local governance based on economic, rather than political, considerations. The analytical part of the paper suggests that profit-maximizing governments...

This paper analyzes the formation, refinement, and evolution of organizational decisionmaking processes, e.g. organizational governments. In doing so, it develops a framework for analyzing a broad cross section of private and non-private formal organizations. Formal organizations are all...

This paper explores the constitutional political economy and history of economic liberalization in China, with the aim of understanding how and why the policies that produced that growth came to be adopted. The paper argues that constitutional reforms played important roles in China's economic...

This paper analyzes the extent to which international public goods and agency problems are present in international organizations. A noncooperative model of the funding choices of donor countries and the subsequent policy choices of an international agency is used to develop hypotheses about the...

The domain of possible power assignments within a multicameral government is multidimensional and essentially continuous. This allows policymaking authority to be divided in many ways and also allows constitutional exchange to take place along many margins of power. This internal market for...

This paper analyzes agreements between governments that determine the division of policy-making power between central and regional governments. Our analysis demonstrates that initial circumstances and political risks affect the degree of centralization that will be adopted, and that asymmetric...

This paper examines some neglected implications of altruism in deterministic voting models in settings where voters differ in their altruistic propensities. Of particular interest is the extent to which relatively small groups of altruistic voters can affect electoral outcomes by simply casting...

This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing privacy issues. Neither privacy nor fame are ordinary economic goods. The demand for both are derived from their associated consequences. In some settings privacy is useful, in others not. When applied to privacy relevant public policies,...

The history of Spain is not usually associated with liberalism or constitutional innovation by most English or American historians. This paper provides a brief history of the rise of liberalism in Spain and uses the Constitution of 1812 as a window into the political liberalism of Spain in the...

This review essay focuses on the subset of Gordon Tullock’s research that contributes to the constitutional political economy (CPE) research program. His most direct work on constitutional political economy is his joint work with James Buchanan, The Calculus of Consent (1962), which is widely...