George Orwell is famous for his two final fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These two works are sometimes understood to defend capitalism against socialism. But as Orwell was a committed socialist, this could not have been his intention. Orwell's criticisms were directed not...

This article explores the post-communist worlds of welfare capitalism in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, including the successor states of the former Soviet Union. It discusses recent developments, whilst offering some additional theoretical reflections on the key factors that have...

Orwell's famous fictions, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four criticized totalitarian forms of socialism from a Public Choice perspective, assuming that socialism would work as an economic system as long as the proper political institutions were in place to curb the potential for the abuse of...

There has been relatively little investigation of the relationship between constitutional transformations and the economic transition in post-communist countries. We develop a simple signaling model in which constitutionalism - a commitment to limit political power and provide judicial defense...

We examine how cultural norms shape attitudes toward immigration. Our causal identification relies on comparing students who moved across the East-West border after German reunification with students who moved within former East Germany. Students who moved from East to West became more positive...

We examine how cultural norms shape attitudes toward immigration. Our causal identification relies on comparing students who moved across the East-West border after German reunification with students who moved within former East Germany. Students who moved from East to West became more positive...

Despite an emerging literature on political determinants of economic performance in China, little is known about whether standing committees of the Communist Party, an institution of collective leadership, matters for economic development. Using Chinese provincial level data for 1997-2011, we...

This paper considers a simple model of economic transition to analyse the dynamics of preferences over economic policy. I consider an economy with two sectors: a high-productivity private sector, which initially employs a small share of the economy's work-force, and a low-productivity state...

This paper discusses the electoral implications of psychological motivation on voting functions. We tested a claim of the Weber-Fechner law as applied to electoral behaviour-specifically, that an expanded public sector leads politicians to make more significant, opportunistic distortions of...

The implementation of European Union directives into national law is at the discretion of member states. We analyze incentives for member states to deviate from these directives when the European Commission may sue a defecting member state and rulings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) are...