In 1903 the Italian economist Amilcare Puviani articulated a theory of fiscal illusion to promote better understanding of the course of political action. Puviani created his theory to explain the failure of political pronouncements to reflect the reality to which those pronouncements claimed to...

Public choice theory was initiated by economists and political scientists in the late-1950s and early 1960s and is generally described as the application of economic concepts and formulations to political phenomena. This essay explains that economizing action and public choice are universal...

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 The law has not been repealed but neither have budgets become balanced....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...

What is the place of political parties within a democratic system of political economy? Parties are often described as intermediaries that lubricate the political process by facilitating the matching of voter preferences with candidate positions. This line of analysis flows from a bi-planar...

This paper is the penultimate draft of the fifth of six chapters of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This paper modifies the benchmark condition of a cooperative democracy to incorporate a realistic treatment of democracy where there exist islands of...

This is the penultimate version of the last of six chapters in a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay explores how public debt is a troubling practice for republican and democratic regimes because of its ability to corrupt the language and practice of...

This is the third of six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay asks the reader to think whether an economy in its entirety is better construed as an engine or as an ecological system. By treating it as an engine,...

This paper is the penultimate draft of the fourth of six chapters of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay establishes an analytical benchmark of a democratic system in which political outcomes reflect genuine consensus among the participants. This...

This is the first of six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. The book's theme is an elaboration and refinement of the early 20th century orientation toward public debt that Antonio de Viti de Marco set forth. As the book's...