The article deals with the evolution of approaches in modern economic theory to the problem of “failures of the state”. This approach, which has developed in opposition to concepts of “market failure”, can be seen as a search for a new strategy of political and economic analysis of...

Based on some national and international studies and researches, this article aims to demonstrate that the level of social polarisation in Romania is a result of political will. Focusing on the study of the domestic tax policy, the authors asks a few questions, the answer of which may lead to...

A binary win/loss model is constructed and estimated on the results from 1990-2004 contests for open U.S. House seats. The results indicate that election outcomes are highly sensitive to the major-party candidates' campaign spending ratios, and increases in spending ratios are shown to translate...

Public choice is one of the few examples of a “creative community” emerging from within the professional academic structures of economics in the postwar period. This article examines the early development of the public choice movement at the University of Virginia and how this movement both...

The constitutional political economy research program established by Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan provides a rigorous analytical framework for the analysis of constitutional choice. I focus on two issues that have received only limited attention in the CPE literature: the problem of...

This paper uses a simple dynamic model where a government performs three functions: taxation, public spending and contract enforcement to study pathologies in resource allocation by government. A key feature of the approach is that states may invest in their future capacities to raise taxes and...

The basic tenet of public choice is to study political behavior and institutions from the viewpoint of rational choice. This paper provides an introduction to the field of public choice on the basis of five classical works.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1986, James M. Buchanan has been one of the pioneers and founders of Public Choice theory and Constitutional Economics. The key to Buchanan's work lies in his deep-rooted devotion to the notions of voluntary exchange, self-determination, individualism,...

To benefit from a wide-spread public support for climate policy, aid agencies strive to show the climate relevance of their development activities. Using project-level aid data and country-level political data for 21 DAC donors from 1995 to 2007, we test whether this may lead to politically...

During the last 50 years, at least four interdisciplinary developments have occurred at the boundaries of political science and economics that have affected the central questions that both political scientists and economists ask, the empirical evidence amassed as a new foundation for...