Supreme auditing institutions: A politico-economic analysis

While the beneficial aspects of a public accounting office's activity are not disputed here, it is argued in this article that four major distortions are produced: the concern with administrative rationality overlooks costs elsewhere (Section 2); budgetary aspects are overvalued compared to other issues (Section 3); incentives-oriented behavior is suppressed (Section 4); and the evaluation is biased by concentrating on minor, instead of major, aspects of inefficiency (Section 5). Section 6 considers alternatives to public accounting offices and makes some suggestions for new institutional arrangements particularly for constitutional rules.     

Mitigating Intergroup Conflict: Effectiveness of Qualifying Subjective Justice Views as an Intervention Technique in Comparison to Empathy Induction

Social Justice Research - Intergroup conflicts can be triggered and perpetuated by collective perceptions of injustice. In two experiments, we applied the qualifying of subjective justice views, a...     

How powerful are public bureaucrats as voters?

Empirical evidence is collected and discussed regarding the influence of public bureaucrats on government sector outcome in their capacity as consumer-voters. It is necessary to isolate the specific effect of working in the public sector (compared to other occupations) on voting participation and on the probability to support an increase in the public budget. For a balanced evaluation of public bureaucrats' power, other forms of their influencing the government sector outcome need to be taken into account.     

Lin Ostrom’s Contribution to Economics: A Personal Evaluation

Lin Ostrom’s work constitutes a great step forward in the analysis of social governance. Instead of focusing on the technical characteristics of goods she studies what types of institutions have emerged and how they affect individual motivation and behavior in public goods and commons situations. Her approach represents a careful analysis of institutions often emerging from below. Unorthodox impacts of institutions on individual motivation and behavior as well as the possible creation of new institutions must be taken into account. The constitution must ensure that the involved individuals can establish adequate institutions regardless of possible opposition by politicians and bureaucrats.