Conventional public choice literature suggests that interest groups have a largely malign effect upon the economy. Suggesting that interest groups are primarily established to lobby governments for rents, the public choice approach essentially rests upon normative presumptions concerning the...

This is a preliminary draft of the fourth of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter starts by explaining that a universal feature of competition is its selection for excellence among...

This essay stems from Jim Dorn's invitation to encapsulate my recent book, Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2016). Where standard political economy treats states as singular entities that intervene into...

This paper uses the European Working Conditions Surveys to examine the intensity of work for male and female employees. The first section gives an overview of the usefulness of the survey for examining European Union (EU) working conditions and shows how women's intensity of work has been...

The article argues that Ostroms’ institutionalism has a dimension that is complex and profound enough to deserve to be considered a “social theory” or a “social philosophy”. The paper pivots around the thesis that the “social philosophy” behind the Bloomington School’s research...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...