Robert Tollison and operationalizing public choice

In this tribute to Robert Tollison, I will outline his contributions to the development of public choice. I focus on Tollison’s work on rent-seeking, the political economy of reform, and the rules level of analysis in sports economics. Throughout his career, Tollison brilliantly figured out ways to take insights from price theory and public choice theory and operationalize them using multiple methods of empirical analysis, including historical interpretation and statistical testing.     

Robert D. Tollison and the economics of politics

This paper tracks economists’ rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making. Confronted with natural scientists’ and McCathythes’ accusations of ideological bias, positive studies emphasizing that collective decisions mechanisms were unstable and inefficient, and normative impossibilities, economists largely relied on the idea the policy ends they worked with reflected a “social consensus.” As the latter crumbled in the 1960s, growing disagreement erupted on how to identify and aggregate those individual values which economists believed should guide applied work, in particular in cost-benefit analysis. The 1970s and 1980s brought new approaches to collective decision: Arrow’s impossibility was solved by expanding the informational basis, it was showed that true preferences could be revealed by making decision costly, and experimentalists and market designers enabled these mechanisms to be tested in the lab before being sold to those public bodies looking for decision procedures that emulated markets. In this new regime, the focus paradoxically shifted to coordination, revelation and efficiency, and those economists studying collective decision processes were marginalized.     

Tollison costs and technological innovation: The case of environmental regulation

This paper departs from the Tullock cost paradigm that views competition for monopoly privilege as a welfare-inimical process that wastefully dissipates preexisting producers' surplus and, occasionally, leads to inefficient increases in costs and counterproductive uses of scarce resources. The potential availability of rent-seeking may bring about the elimination of inefficient regulatory regimes that retard or prevent the introduction of cost-reducing innovations. Air quality management is but one area in which innovation rent-seeking holds promise for concrete welfare gains. Researchers may wish to focus on institutional mechanisms designed to overcome the transactions costs and free rider disincentives to the formation of a coalition to seek innovation rents. An example of such a mechanism might be a joint venture that requires all venture members to engage in lobbying and to contribute to collective research efforts. These unaddressed questions await future research.The authors are grateful for the insightful comments of Gordon Tullock, Robert D. Tollison, Michael T. Marlow and J.R. Clark. The usual caveats apply. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and should not be taken to represent the views of their employers.     

The remarkable quango: Knowledge,politics, and walfare reform

This paper describes the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 (FSA), focusing on the politics of welfare reform. It considers especially the role played by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's assessments of experimental state programs designed to move welfare recipients out of dependency. The paper argues that those assessments were pivotal to the passage of FSA and that they demonstrate the growing potential power of policy research. It also argues that achieving that potential required conditions not often found together: timely and clearly relevant findings based on convincing research methods employed by an organization regarded as impartial, and the lucid and persistent presentation of those findings in many forms and at many forums.     

Demoted leaders and exiled candidates: Disentangling party and person in the voter’s mind

The debate on personalization in electoral politics is inconclusive. There is confusion about the concept of personalization. Moreover, the fact that party evaluation and person evaluation are interrelated complicates the debate. This paper focuses on the latter problem by employing counterfactual thought experiments in which voters are asked to simulate their vote with their candidate lower on the party list or nominated by another party. The results show that most voters put party above person and less than ten percent put person above party. A sizeable third category has a preference for an individual candidate as long as that candidate does not leave the party. Also, personalization is slightly more important with regard to (the leaders of) populist parties, and individual candidates are more important for voters with less education, less political knowledge and a less deeply rooted party preference.     

Right,the state and the conception of the person

The contemporary world‐historical epoch involves both the universal extension of the state type of organization of society, and the development of a universal idea of the person in the discourse of human rights. The status of the person requires positive constitution, and such constitution requires an idea of the state that informs the actual working of states. The idea of the state cannot be developed unless the natural right conception of the basis of personhood is abandoned. Nor can the idea of the state be developed if it continues to be confused with the idea of the nation. Hegel offers us an idea of the state that we can continue to build. For Hegel the state denotes both the institutional reality of the state and the subjectivity that is required if the idea of the state is to be actualized. There is a dialectical relationship between the adequacy of the state‐centered institutional order for the effective support and facilitation of personhood and our subjective capacity to be and act as persons. Thus, processes by which the idea of the state is undermined are not independent of subjective experience and our willingness to be and act as persons.