Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject....

When bad economics is good politics / Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Hilton L. Root -- Order, disorder, and economic change: Latin America versus North America / Douglass C. North, William Summerhill, and Barry R. Weingast -- Political institutions, political survival, and policy success / Bruce...