A popular argument about economic policy under uncertainty states that decentralisation offers the possibility to learn from local or regional policy experiments. We argue that such learning processes are not trivial and do not occur frictionlessly: Voters have an inherent tendency to retain a...

The sociologist R. Dahrendorf has recently suggested that there is no and there ought to be no convergence of economic policies towards some common ideal model. On the contrary, he states that `diversity is [...] at the very heart of a world that has abandoned the need for closed, encompassing...

In contrast to the contractarian approach to constitutional economics, we follow Voigt (1999) in assuming that constitutional rules are closely connected to informal institutions and that their evolution is a matter of interest group activity and implicit re-interpretation. We add to this the...