Mancur Olson's theory of the decline of nations is path-breaking in political economics. It has been tested cross-sectionally in numerous empirical studies. We survey the existing results briefly, with a special focus on studies using the number of lobbies as an exogenous variable. Using data...

Starting from the secular fact of an increasing governmentś share, a retrospective on Adolph Wagnerś writings seems worthwhile. A leading German economist of the Bismarck era, he first formulated the famous law of increasing state activityʺ for industrializing nations. After analyzing his way...

Taking Macur Olsonś theory of the decline of nations as pathbreaking in this field we develop a formal model of the behavior of interest groups and their interaction to win some deeper insights into the interior mechanics of the interest-group-state. Followed by a brief survey of empirical...