Public choice and tort reform

The common law originally was thought to be immune to rent seeking. More recently, scholars have recognized that attorneys are engaged in exactly that activity. Rent seeking by the legal profession has greatly expanded the scope of US tort law, and generated efforts to reverse its expansion. Organized groups (attorneys, businesses and doctors) are active on both sides of the issue and the partisans have numerous tools available for advancing their agendas, such as litigating, lobbying for favorable rules and attempting to elect sympathetic legislators and judges. All of this creates an ideal setting for public choice analysis.     

Public choice principles of redistricting

This paper uses fundamental principles of public choice, mainly the median voter theorem, to develop a simple theory of redistricting. The focus is on how closely policy outcomes correspond to majority rule. The main results are: (1) Potential policy bias in favor of nonmajority groups is structurally linked to the number of legislative seats and the population, and the structure of most states puts them very close to the theoretically maximum bias. (2) Random districting, which might seem like the essence of neutrality, does not eliminate policy bias on average. (3) Traditional principles of compact, contiguous districts that respect existing political boundaries, stressed in the Supreme Court’s Shaw v. Reno decision, minimize the chance of nonmajoritarian outcomes. Our analysis also offers a gerrymandering explanation for the positive relation between seats and spending that is usually taken as support for the “Law of 1/n.”     

Public choice theory and antitrust policy

We survey the pioneering contributions of Robert Tollison to the theory and practice of antitrust law enforcement. Inspired by his period of service during Ronald Reagan’s first administration as Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics, Tollison was the first scholar to apply public choice reasoning to the question why antitrust frequently fails to achieve its stated goal of protecting consumers against unwarranted exercises of market power. In supplying evidence that the outcomes of antitrust processes are shaped more by special interests than by the public’s interest, he was instrumental in launching a wholly new research program.     

Public choice in private markets

He has written widely on social and economic issues.     

Valence politics and economic crisis: Electoral choice in Canada 2008

This paper investigates factors affecting voting behavior in Canada’s October 2008 federal election. The election was held in the context of a rapidly worsening financial crisis that threatened to become a global economic meltdown. National survey data gathered in the 2008 Political Support in Canada Study reveal that the deteriorating economy trumped the opposition Liberal Party’s Green Shift Program as the major campaign issue by a huge margin. Damage done to the governing Conservatives by the economic crisis was limited by perceptions of their leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Analyses of a mixed logit model of electoral choice shows that although the Conservatives had a relatively small share of party identifiers and Harper was widely disliked, his image as “safe pair on hands” helped his party weather the political storm generated by the flood of bad economic news.     

Public choice in a federal system

Except for the mobility constraints imposed on political decisions of lower-level governments, public choice analysts assume that the working of the political process under federalism remains the same at all levels of governments as under unitary state. This paper argues that one dimension of the political process in a federalist framework lends itself to specific economic analysis, namely the fact that, once constitutional limits break down and functions overlap, two or more levels of government compete for the same voters in the supply of services in a given territory. Viewing votes as inputs in the production of political outputs, the conventional analysis of allocation under common-property rule should shed light on the outcome of this process. The analysis shows that it is in the interest of both suppliers to seek to gain the votes in being first to implement programs. There are thus two forces operating in a typical federalist system, an expansionist one rooted in the political dynamics analysed here, and a restrictionist one based on the mobility of resources among decentralized entities. This may explain why the empirical record is rather mixed on the contribution of federalism to containing government growth. The consequences of this process are derived and possible avenues for improvement are explored.     

Public choice in the new century

This special issue of Public Choice was designed to afford leading scholars the opportunity to summarize the current state of the public choice literature in key areas of public policy concern and to offer their thoughts about future directions of research. By laying out public choice frameworks for analyzing some of the major challenges confronting democratic governments at the dawn of the 21st century, the issue’s overarching goal is to demonstrate the vibrancy and continuing relevance of the public choice research program.     

Public choice in local judicial systems

For their contributions to earlier drafts, acknowledgements are extended to Webb Smathers, Ron Faas, Rod Ziemer and other reviewers.     

Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.