<DIV>Direct democracy is alive and well in the United States. Citizens are increasingly using initiatives and referendums to take the law into their own hands, overriding their elected officials to set tax, expenditure, and social policies. John G. Matsusaka's <I>For the Many or the Few</I> provides the...</i></div>

The Companion lays out a comprehensive history of the field and, in five additional parts, it explores public choice contributions to the study of the origins of the state, the organization of political activity, the analysis of decision-making in non-market institutions, the examination of...

This paper presents a model of an economy in which traders use social capital to reduce transaction costs. A key assumption is that there are two types of social capital: “village” capital relies on personal networks and repeat play to guarantee contracts; “market” capital relies on...

Corporations use a variety of processes to allocate capital. This article studies the benefits and costs of several common budget procedures from the perspective of a model with agency and information problems. Processes that delegate aspects of the decision to the agent result in too many...

The quality of government is often measured by the degree of congruence between policy choices and public opinion, but there is not an accepted method for calculating congruence. This paper offers a new approach to measuring policy-opinion congruence, and uses it to study 10 high-profile issues...

The purpose of this essay is to describe the practice and theory of the increasingly important political phenomenon of direct democracy and the main lessons from the scholarly literature. Many questions remain to be answered, but the emerging view is that direct democracy works--allowing the...