Gordon Tullock: His journal and his scholarship

The results presented here suggest that Public Choice is broadly cited by economists and political scientists. The journal currently ranks, approximately, in the middle of the pack with respect to various citation measures. Also, since the late seventies, the journal's ranking has improved significantly relative to both social science journals and to comparable economics journals. Some of the papers published in Public Choice are well cited and several made a significant impact on the thinking of scholars in both economics and political science. Either through his work as editor or through his articles, the thought of Gordon Tullock is well represented in the elite group of articles published in Public Choice.The analysis of citations in Section 4 shows that Tullock's ideas and writing have had considerable impact on the thinking of economists. His contributions are substantial, often multi-disciplinary, and certain to be enduring.     

Tullock challenges: happiness, revolutions, and democracy

Gordon Tullock is one of the most important of the founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical ??Tullock Challenges.?? The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and to some extent Google. Both innovations lead to strong incentives by governments to manipulate the policy outcomes. In general, ??What is important will be manipulated by the government.?? To restrain government manipulation, one has to turn to Constitutional Economics and increase the possibilities for direct popular participation and federalism or introduce random mechanisms.     

Vote splitting as insurance against uncertainty

The present article offers a rational choice explanation for political ticket splitting. It considers a game-theoretic model of voting and bargaining within Congress and between Congress and the president. When parties are ideologically oriented and voters' utilities are state dependent, the model shows that if there is uncertainty about the true state of the world, ticket splitting emerges as a tool risk-averse voters use in order to insure themselves against extreme policies in bad states of nature.     

Thinking about order without thought: the lifetime contributions of Gordon Tullock

Philosophers tend to think of them as “conventions.” Economists and some biologists conceive of them as “spontaneous orders,” a concept discussed at some length in other papers in this issue. Perhaps the most general conception is “systems” theory, with roots in many disciplines. Many scholars in the sciences have tried to advance their research agendas by bringing systems theory to the study of human civilization. Gordon Tullock, a scholar who in the future will be recognized as someone well ahead of his own time, traveled the reverse path, in many cases being the first to suggest that the path even exists.     

The solution to the Tullock rent-seeking game when R>2: Mixed-strategy equilibria and mean dissipation rates

In Tullock's rent-seeking model, the probability a player wins the game depends on expenditures raised to the power R. We show that a symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium exists when R>2, and that overdissipation of rents does not arise in any Nash equilibrium. We derive a tight lower bound on the level of rent dissipation that arises in a symmetric equilibrium when the strategy space is discrete, and show that full rent dissipation occurs when the strategy space is continuous. Our results are shown to be consistent with recent experimental evidence on the dissipation of rents.     

RPR officials: a report on an inquiry into the Neo-Gaullist Party elite

Abstract. Based upon a questionnaire survey of delegates to the RPR National Congress held in Grenoble in November 1984, this paper summarizes a three-dimensional analysis of RPR officials (demographic and sociological identification; political mobilization, party functions and activism; ideological trends and political attitudes) which seeks to appraise how the evolution of the Gaullist movement correlates with changes in French politics between 1976 and 1986.     

Corporate response strategies to regulatory uncertainty: evidence from uncertainty about post-Kyoto regulation

A better understanding of firms’ response strategies to regulatory uncertainty enables policymakers to improve policymaking efficiency and to enhance the effectiveness of regulation. Based on a literature review, we categorize responses according to their objective toward regulatory uncertainty into four strategies: avoidance, reduction, adaptation, and disregard strategies. Unique data from a worldwide cross-industry survey show that firms predominantly pursue reduction, and to a lesser extent adaptation and disregard strategies, in response to post-Kyoto regulatory uncertainty. Surprisingly, firms in fact only sporadically pursue avoidance strategies, in contradiction to their own public announcements commonly made during policymaking to realize such strategies. The degree of regulatory uncertainty perceived and its interpretation as a threat increase the pursuit of most of these strategies. In addition, firms’ response strategies to post-Kyoto regulatory uncertainty differ across industries and partly across regions.     

Interpretive policy inquiry: A response to its limitations

With positivist and technocratic notions still prevalent, Paul Healy's (1986) insightful effort to advance “interpretive policy inquiry” both underscores the limitations of conventional analysis and helps us to grasp the policy process in human terms. Yet the article falls short of a systematic presentation of the interpretive position and, in doing so, reveals the limitations of that approach: the need for an explicitly critical posture becomes clear. This point is made with particular attention to a pre-positivist figure, Machiavelli. An erratum to this article is available at .     

On studying world order: A plea for systematic inquiry

Conclusion The creation of improved systems of world order requires great care. Alternative configurations may or may not prove more suitable, and each must be painstakingly examined on its own merits. For those of us who are actively concerned with studying about world order, this means the application of a far more rigorous conception of inquiry to our subject. So long as we cannot accept the Leibnizian claim that this is certainly the best of all possible worlds, our search for better ones must certainly be the best of all possible searches. This means that models of world order must be derived from appropriate hypotheses and subjected to the strictures of systematic analysis. World order studies must be treated in accordance with the strict canons of inquiry outlined in this essay. Only then can they begin to develop the highly generalized system of theory that characterizes any science.     

政府问责制:责任政府的实践形式

政府问责制是责任政府最基本的实践形式,它既是责任政府建设的核心环节,也是责任政府实现的保障机制。目前,我国政府问责制建设还表现出权责不对等、"集体行动"的逻辑、监督双方信息不对称、政府回应不强等问题。我们必须通过完善立法、加强监督与问责制度建设等举措来解决这些问题,进一步完善政府问责制。     

The mobilization of counter-expertise: Using Fischer's model of policy inquiry

Conclusion In this case, Fischer's model of critical policy inquiry provided crucial support in the mobilization of counter-expertise to contest the arguments advanced by the government agencies. The outcome in this case depended not only upon the use of the model, but also upon a context of complex social and political factors. Nonetheless, the success of the residents of Heijplaat in saving their neighborhood shows that a model such as Fischer's helps to focus attention on questions that are inconvenient for the interests of official experts — and thus need to be raised.     

Trust as an alternative to risk

Many students of trust see it as a way to mitigate risk through the development of strong institutions that create trust. I offer an alternative view of trust, moralistic or generalized trust, that depends upon a psychological foundation of optimism and control. This form of trust, in contrast to arguments by Paldam and others, has “value” independent of experience. Using data from a survey of metropolitan Philadelphia in 1996, I show that if you believe that “most people can be trusted,” you are substantially more likely to see your neighborhood as safe at night even controlling for both the objective level of crime as well having been the victim of a crime, having had parents who were the victims of crime, watching local television news (which exposes people to violent events), where you live (central city and suburb), and gender. Trust thus “reduces” perceptions of risk independently of personal experience.     

Law-and-economics: why Gordon Tullock prefers Napoleon Bonaparte over the Duke of Wellington; and why he may end up on St. Helena

Most scholars in the field of law-and-economics lean to the view that the common law is efficient. Tullock, however, argues that the common law is inefficient and suggests dramatic modifications to the American legal system, transforming it from a common law system to a civil code system and abandoning the adversarial proceedings in favor of an inquisitorial process. This essay summarizes and critically evaluates the thrusts of Tullock’s 1988 article and his 1997 book, which, together direct a full-frontal attack on the Anglo-Saxon common law system.     

Institutionalizing uncertainty: the choice of electoral formulas

Taken from an infinite set of divisors methods, the D’Hondt formula is the unique rule that maximizes the minimum number of seats for parties exceeding average size but not surpassing an absolute majority of the votes. This property is also shared, in the quota set of methods, by the Droop formula. At the same time, these two methods are those most commonly observed in practice. This paper relates the property stated to the observed facts. If parties try to maximize the minimum number of seats for a given share of votes, then the D’Hondt formula should be chosen. This choice is consistent with rational parties that make institutional choices in an uncertain environment.