China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea

China's defiance of the arbitration tribunal ruling overwhelmingly rejecting its extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea has exposed competition between the United States and China, attracting regional states into their respective strategic orbits. China's attempt to challenge America's traditional position as the regional maritime power is gaining strength.     

J. M. Buchanan’s contractarian constitutionalism: political economy for democratic society

Public Choice - The purpose of this paper is to support three claims. Firstly, that it is Buchanan’s uncompromising commitment to a methodological and a normative individualism to which his...     

South Africa’s troubled outlook

Elections to Ukraine's parliament should result in a new government that reflects the political changes that have occurred in the country since late 2013. But if it is not able to implement long-overdue institutional reforms, there is a substantial risk of another political crisis in the next few years.     

Rediscovering Buchanan’s rediscovery: non-market exchange versus antiseptic allocation

Public Choice - While Buchanan is best known for the economics of politics and constitutions, his seminal contributions to this field are but one branch of his more underlying methodology and...     

The real purpose of the program: a case study in James M. Buchanan’s efforts at academic entrepreneurship to “save the books” in economics

Public Choice - Using archival material from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy and first-person recollections from relevant figures, we reconstruct James M....     

Moral community and moral order: Buchanan’s theory of obligation

Public Choice - In 1981, James Buchanan published the text of a lecture entitled “Moral Community, Moral Order, and Moral Anarchy.” The argument in that paper deserves more attention...     

James M. Buchanan’s constitutional project: past and future

Public Choice - A substantial amount of James Buchanan’s academic work was devoted to his constitutional project: the development of procedures for designing constitutional rules that would...     

The unwinding of South Africa’s foreign policy

South African President Jacob Zuma's corrupt personalisation of foreign policy, systematic government mismanagement and rising xenophobia are marginalising South Africa in continental and international affairs. Restoring South Africa to its leadership standing will be a major priority for his successor and the next government.     

South Korea’s presidential transition and strategic challenges

Moon Jae-in, South Korea's new president, faces stiff domestic challenges and is less inclined towards confrontation with North Korea than either his predecessor or the Trump administration. Nevertheless, South Korea’s alliance with the United States is likely to endure with some modifications and perhaps, given North Korea’s provocations, some upgrades.     

It’s a Group Thing: How Voters go to the Polls Together

Political Behavior - Across European Parliament, local and general elections in Denmark between half and three quarters of voters in households with multiple voters cast their vote within a minute...     

Youthscapes: the politics of belonging for ‘Makwerekwere’ youth in South African schools

This article is framed within the global context of immigration and the resultant debates around citizenship, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. The task of schools as social institutions is to ‘integrate’ and ‘educate’ immigrant youth and as such they can be seen as the primary sites where the politics of belonging and struggles over belonging and citizenship are waged. Drawing on the conceptual framework of ‘youthscapes’ and the theoretical framework of critical race theory, this article engages with the contradictions inherent in schools and the manner in which the South African education system is implicated in constructing different ‘kinds’ of citizens and reproducing hierarchies of belonging, even in its efforts at inclusivity.     

“That’s not how it works”: economic indicators and the construction of partisan economic narratives

This study examines the processes through which partisans update their (biased) economic judgments during periods of mixed and asymmetric economic performance. I show evidence that citizens express relatively unbiased perceptions of the movement of the stock market, suggesting that partisans do not engage in processes of motivated reasoning when reporting judgments of widely available economic data. Instead, partisans respond to fluctuations in stock market performance by revising their assumptions about the way the economy works: in response to positive or negative developments, the stock market is perceived to be more or less important for the health of the broader US economy depending upon Americans’ partisan worldviews. This form of biased narrative construction has substantial importance in light of a “two-speed” post-Great Recession economy.     

Macron’s strategic vision for Europe

President Emmanuel Macron’s February 2020 speech at the École Militaire, ostensibly about French nuclear policy, was also a major strategic statement about France’s role in Europe and the world. His primary message, directed towards Berlin in particular, advocates for an ‘awakening’ of Europe as an autonomous actor in the defence and possibly nuclear realms.     

Can a contractarian be a paternalist? The logic of James M. Buchanan’s system

We consider the simplest version of a jungle economy à la Piccione-Rubinstein, wherein as many agents as goods are assumed, agents consume at most one indivisible good, and a transitive strong power relation exists. We first study the wilderness of jungle equilibria, i.e., whether they are Pareto-minimal (an allocation is Pareto-minimal if it is impossible to reduce the welfare of one agent without increasing the welfare of another). We show that jungle equilibria are not necessarily Pareto-minimal. We then study and characterize the set of Pareto-minimal jungle equilibria. Second, we tackle the case of equally powerful people, in contrast to the assumption that the power relation is asymetric. Assuming specifically a transitive weak power relation, we show that jungle equilibria exist, but that they are not always unique, nor Pareto-optimal. We also provide conditions under which those equilibria are Pareto-minimal.