Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
109
result(s) for
"Congleton, Roger D"
Sort by:
Perfecting parliament : constitutional reform, liberalism, and the rise of Western democracy
\"This book explains why contemporary liberal democracies are based on historical templates rather than revolutionary reforms; why the transition in Europe occurred during a relatively short period in the nineteenth century; why politically and economically powerful men and women voluntarily supported such reforms; how interests, ideas, and pre-existing institutions affected the reforms adopted; and why the countries that liberalized their political systems also produced the Industrial Revolution. The analysis is organized in three parts. The first part develops new rational choice models of (1) governance, (2) the balance of authority between parliaments and kings, (3) constitutional exchange, and (4) suffrage reform. The second part provides historical overviews and detailed constitutional histories of six important countries. The third part provides additional evidence in support of the theory, summarizes the results, contrasts the approach taken in this book with that of other scholars, and discusses methodological issues\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Federalism and pandemic policies: variety as the spice of life
In the ordinary course of life, choices vary with age and other factors because one’s opportunities vary with one’s circumstances. Thus, investments in and expenditures on healthcare (and most other things) vary with age and a variety of other factors, including whether one lives in a rural area, suburb, or central city, health risks, risk aversion, and beliefs about the nature of a good life. Because assessment of the effects of illnesses vary with the same factors, the conclusions reached about best private and governmental health policies also tend to vary. This implies that conformity to “ideal” pandemic policies is more likely to be generated by a federal or polycentric system of policy making than a unitary system, especially ones that are constrained by a generality principle.
Journal Article
Behavioral economics and the Virginia school of political economy: overlaps and complementarities
A variety of complementarities and overlaps exist between the psychological strand of behavioral economics and the subjectivist strand of Virginia Political Economy. This paper provides an overview of those commonalities and places them in a common information processing framework. The framework can account for systematic mistakes, framing effects, subjectivity, individual variety, and several issues in constitutional political economy. It also reveals many commonalities between these two quite different approaches to human behavior.
Journal Article
Ethics and good governance
Public choice research has revealed a variety of political dilemmas associated with governance that tend to make good governance unlikely. This paper suggests that the good governments that we observe are likely to have cultural or ethical support–support that solves or ameliorates the dilemmas uncovered by public choice research. It demonstrates that five important impediments to good governance can be ameliorated by internalized ethical dispositions. Although good government is not generated by ethical conduct per se, some forms of conduct regarded as ethical are supportive of good governance and arguably prerequisites to it.
Journal Article
Grounding multidisciplinary public policy analysis in methodological individualism: with an illustrating study of the economic and political effects of variations in a nation’s average work ethic
This paper suggests that a relatively minor, but important generalization of the rational choice approach used in economics and game theory can provide sufficient flexibility, breadth, and realism to be used as the basis for interdisciplinary analysis. Multi-disciplinary analysis does not require abandoning the “rational” choice model of individual decision making worked out over the past century and a half by economists, game theorists, and other users of rational-choice models in sociology, political science, history, biology, and philosophy. This paper illustrates how this can be done by modeling the economic and political effects of the average strength of a nation’s work ethic and testing some of its implications.
Journal Article
On the emergence of a classic work
Gordon Tullock’s “Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft” is by now widely regarded to be a classic work in public choice. However, like many “classic papers,” it was not always so highly regarded. It was rejected at several journals before finding its way to print and arguably took two or three decades to be fully appreciated. This paper discusses developments in the public choice and rent seeking literatures that helped bring Tullock’s paper to its status as a classic work in political economy.
Journal Article
Intellectual foundations of public choice, the forest from the trees
After War World II, a group of scholars began using rational choice models from economics and game theory to examine the manner in which public policies would be determined if men and women were as “rational” in their political activities as they were in other spheres of life. The implications of such an approach to politics were not obvious and took decades to be worked out. Indeed, they are still being worked out. The result was a new field of research that deepened our understanding of economic and political systems and their many interdependencies. This review essay provides an overview of the core findings of public choice during its first half century and of the boot-strapping process through which those findings emerged. Those core findings provide the idea base and results that ground most contemporary public choice research.
Journal Article
Governance by true believers: supreme duties with and without totalitarianism
This paper analyzes how governance by true believers differs from that by ordinary idealists and pragmatists. To do so, the paper develops a semi-lexicographic framework for analyzing behavior of persons who have internalized belief systems with “supreme” duties. It uses that framework to analyze the extent to which such duties tend to affect private behavior and demands for public policies. Bernholz’s research on totalitarian systems demonstrates that many of the least attractive governments in human history have been motivated by totalitarian belief systems. This paper agrees with that conclusion but suggests that many other results are also possible and that some of the most attractive governments in human history also have been motivated by belief systems with supreme duties.
Journal Article
The \Logic of Collective Action\ and beyond
This article provides an overview of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action and its impact on Olson's subsequent work. It also suggests that the implications of his simple, elegant, theory have not yet been fully worked out. To illustrate this point, the second half of the essay demonstrates that the number of privileged and latent groups and their costs in a given society are not entirely determined by economic factors or group size alone. Politics, technology, and culture also matter.
Journal Article
On the stability of U.S. politics
An important issue associated with empirical research is the extent to which statistical results continue to hold in the post-sample period. Although many tests of robustness within the period of a given study are routinely reported, relatively little attention is paid to model performance in the post-sample period. This paper examines the post-sample performance of the Congleton and Shughart (Econ Inq 28(1): 109–132, 1990) estimates of three public choice models of Social Security benefit levels. The Social Security program is the single largest line item in the federal budget; so, examining the post-sample performance of the Congleton–Shughart estimates also sheds light on the long-run stability of political processes in the United States. In general, we find that the three public choice models perform well in the post-sample period, although there are several caveats to that conclusion. The results of our post-sample study also suggest that the political processes of the United States with respect to major fiscal policies are more stable and robust than news reports suggest.
Journal Article