Democracy usually is identified by the right to vote. However, in recent times voting procedures have been criticized, as they seemingly do not guarantee that all parts of the population have an adequate voice in the established political process. We suggest invigorating an old but nearly...

Improving transparency and enabling the principal to hold its agents accountable is a major issue in any principal agent relationship. This paper focuses on the role of public auditors in this task and presents evidence on the impact of auditor term length and term limits on government...

Public auditors should reduce agency problems and improve transparency. We address the question of whether auditors should be elected by the citizens or appointed by either the legislature or the executive, and explore the influence of conducting performance audits. We construct a unique dataset...

This paper provides a framework for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of public assets owned by: (i) The State, (ii) A State owned corporatized body, (iii) Private investors or (iv) By a network of constituents. A basis is presented for analysing these four governance architectures based...

We examine a stark setting in which security or protection can be provided by self-governing groups or by for-profit entrepreneurs (kings, kleptocrats, or mafia dons). Though self-governance is best for the population, it faces problems of long-term viability. Typically, in providing security...

The bulk of James Buchanan's contributions to political economy occupy 20 volumes in Liberty Fund's collection of his works. Reading those works shows both that Buchanan injected new strands of thought into that tradition and that his oeuvre contains points of apparent incoherence. To speak of a...

Studying Native American reservations, and their historical formation, I find that their forced integration of autonomous polities into a system of shared governance had large negative long-run consequences, even though the affected people were ethnically and linguistically homogenous....

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...

Fish stock depletion in the world's oceans and seas is one of the world's most serious environmental problems. In the Greek seas, the problem of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing has devastating effects on island and coastal artisanal fishing villages, members of which have been...

America's most recent recession has taken a toll on public agency budgets, including criminal justice agencies. More than half of U.S. states have had their corrections budgets reduced in recent years. Fortunately, crime has remained fairly stable during this same time frame, despite fears that...