Gordon Tullock and Public Choice

Gordon Tullock is one of the founders of the field of public choice, of the Public Choice Society, and of the Public Choice Center. He is a coauthor with James M. Buchanan of one of the true classics in the public choice field—The Calculus of Consent. He has been one of the field’s most prolific scholars, with his research spanning virtually all dimensions of the public choice field. This article surveys his major contributions.     

Democracy,preferences and paternalism

Democracy is essentially a political system that respects people's preferences, with models of democracy differing principally in how they accomplish that. Choice among those models can be facilitated by reflecting upon various public policies which are not preference-respecting. Examination of policies which are paternalistic, and justifiably so, reveals which sorts of preferences ought be to respected and which not. These findings are then used to reflect back onto our choice among models of democracy.     

Reapplying behavioral symmetry: public choice and choice architecture

Public Choice - New justifications for government intervention based on behavioral psychology rely on a behavioral asymmetry between expert policymakers and market participants. Public choice...     

Ethics and good governance

Public Choice - 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...     

Partially verifiable deliberation in voting

Public Choice - This study analyzes a model of collective choice in voting when information is verifiable and pre-voting deliberation is allowed. Each voter has, independently of the others, a...     

Evidence and fully revealing deliberation with non-consequentialist jurors

Public Choice - We analyze a model of binary choice by a committee, when information is hard and pre-voting deliberation is allowed. Each member has, independently of the others, a positive...     

On the emergence of a classic work: a short history of the impact of Gordon Tullock’s Welfare Costs of Tariffs,Monopolies, and Theft

Public Choice - 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...     

Ignoring the Electoral College: why public choice economists understate the probability of decisive voters

Public Choice - When considering the probability of voters being decisive in presidential elections, public choice economists typically proceed as if the probability can reasonably be approximated...     

Impossibility results in the axiomatic theory of intertemporal choice

Public Choice - We have shown formally that for infinite generation, transitive, intertemporal choice procedures the familiar conditions of Pareto optimality and independence together with the...     

The efficiency of regulatory arbitrage

Public Choice - Classic public choice skepticism about the regulatory state, based on theories of rent-seeking, rent extraction and regulatory capture, is based on the unrealistic, and usually...     

Titles for me but not for thee: transitional gains trap of property rights extension in Colombia

Public Choice - I apply Tullock’s transitional gains trap to the formalization of property titles in Latin America to understand public choice problems in mending institutions. In an area...     

Local governments' monopoly power and local tax reform: Theory and evidence from the U.K.

Public Choice - The paper briefly reviews recent research that adapts and extends the Tiebout model of residential choice, paying special attention to those studies which utilize Hirschman's...     

The experimental search for free riders: Some reflections and observations

Public Choice - The presence of the incentive to free ride in ‘pure situations’ has not heretofore been contested, and we would have expected that choice settings could be designed in...     

Issue Voting as a Constrained Choice Problem

Prevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies. Choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters, and their composition is left to researchers' discretion. This article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set. We apply the “constrained choice conditional logistic regression” to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters' choice set compositions. Further, we look into the effect of parties' policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters' choice sets. We find that voters' choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties' policy offerings on their electoral fates.     

Political science and public choice: 1950–70

The early contributors to Public Choice did not find a sympathetic reception among political scientists. During the years 1950-70, political scientists were either indifferent to or hostile to the emerging field of rational choice in which the approach and tools of economics are applied to politics. In the essay that follows I attempt to explain this situation and why another revolution – the behavioral – dominated political science for more than twenty years. Despite the prominence of rational choice in some political science journals, that dominance continues, a matter I hope to address in a subsequent article.     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

Public choice and political philosophy: Reflections on the works of Gordon Spinoza and David Immanuel Buchanan

The paper explores some of the surprisingly many relations between theories of public choice and political philosophy. Focusing on variants of Homo oeconomicus it does so systematically rather than historically. But it factors in the history of the two disciplines along with some recent developments in (experimental) economics. This sheds new light on the counterfactual assumption that in politics everybody should be supposed to be a knave and suggests that we better seek factually sound behavioral foundations for Public Choice.     

Protecting Individual Rights Through a Federal System: James Buchanan's View of Federalism

James Buchanan is a Nobel Prize winning economist and the founderof the public choice movement in economics. Public Choice playeda critical role in underpinning conservative attacks on thewelfare state in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. Asa committed supporter of free markets and strong skeptic oflarge governments, Buchanan has long supported the use of federalismto protect individual liberty, promote democratic efficiency,and help foster community values. This article reviews Buchanan'sresearch on the advantages of a federal system.     

Truth-telling,dominant strategies,and iterative Groves mechanisms

Public Choice - This essay demonstrates that if an organization uses a price-decomposition algorithm to solve a decentralized resource allocation problem, in which rewards are those of a Groves...     

Perceptions of policy choice in contemporary democracies

Though the concept of choice is essential to democracy, little is known about how citizens make sense of the diversity of policies offered by political elites. Research has found that institutional arrangements such as low electoral thresholds and multiple party competitors are associated with greater policy choice. Other work emphasises non‐institutional factors. No research, however, examines what the voters think. In this article these alternative explanations are assessed in terms of whether citizens believe parties to provide choice over policy. Evidence from 25 democracies reveals that electoral and party systems have no direct effect. Choice perceptions are instead affected by non‐policy factors: social heterogeneity and individual political dispositions. This result contrasts with analyses showing a strong connection between electoral rules and the diversity of messages communicated by parties during campaigns. The article also shows how choice perceptions matter for political behaviour. Overall, study findings imply that the promise of institutions for fostering representation is weaker than previously assumed.