Feminism and the political: introduction

The paper compares and confronts the work of two of the most distinguished living Marxist philosophers: G. A. Cohen from the English-speaking world, and Louis Althusser from France. It develops a critique of certain of Cohen's theses from the standpoint of ideas present in the work of Althusser. But it also problematizes certain presuppositions common to the work of both – in particular, the notion that historical development (transition or revolution) should be explained in terms of some general theory of non-correspondence between productive forces and production relations: the difference being simply that, within this scheme, Althusser accords explanatory primacy to the latter, Cohen to the former. Cohen's and Althusser's accounts of technological innovation and development are also compared, in connexion with the contrasting place which they attribute to the notice of human rationality on the one side and class struggle on the other.     

Executive veto and spending limitation: Positive political economy with implications for institutional choice

The consequences of institutional change in the budgetary process are not generally determinate independent of the preferences of political actors. Nonetheless, this study shows for a general class of preference configurations that the legislative branch cannot be made better off by a spending limitation unless the executive is empowered with a line-item veto. In the absence of executive item-veto authority there is no incentive for the legislature to constrain spending.     

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.     

Rent seeking at 52: an introduction to a special issue of public choice

Public Choice - Regulation of health and safety has placed an unacknowledged burden on low-income households and workers. Billions of dollars are spent every year on regulations that seek to reduce...     

The United States,Japan, and the European Union: comparing political economy approaches to China

Abstract

This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US–Japan and US–EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US–Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe.     

On the political economy of state highway expenditures: Some evidence of the relative performance of alternative public choice models

This paper explores the extent to which the public demand for roads and/or power of special interest groups determines road expenditures at the state level using an extension of the methodology developed in Congleton and Shughart (1990). Reduced form models of median voter demand, special interest group equilibria, and a combined model are estimated using cross-sectional state data from the United States. We generally find support for the hypothesis that voting matters. The pure median voter models have a better fit than the pure special interest group models. Moreover, in our combined model, we find that variables from the median-voter model can not be dropped without significantly reducing the combined model's fit.     

Behavioral economics and public choice: introduction to a special issue

We provide an introduction to a special issue on behavioral economics and public choice.

     

A theory of entangled political economy, with application to TARP and NRA

The recent financial crisis has provoked a raft of contending claims as to whether the cause of the crisis is better attributed to market failure or political failure. Such claims are predicated on a presumption that markets and polities are meaningfully separate entities. To the contrary, we argue that contemporary arrangements create an entangled political economy that renders theorizing based on separation often misleading. Within this alternative framework of entangled political economy, we illuminate both the recent Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and the New Deal??s National Recovery Administration (NRA).     

Shocks and oscillations: The political economy of Hungary

While economic voting studies exist for the new democracies in post-communist Europe, time-series vote functions are scarce. Here, we fill this void by testing how public support for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) responds to political shocks and economic oscillations, using monthly data from 2002 to 2009 (N = 83). As the economy fluctuates, on both objective and subjective measures, Hungarians reward or punish the Prime Minister’s party in the traditional manner. Political shocks, including the change to an MSZP minority government, the 2006 riots, and the IMF bailout, induced increased support for the party while troops in Iraq and the election campaign led Hungarians to be less supportive of the party. Clearly, government support in Hungary can be explained in political economic terms, despite the newness of democracy and the severe economic uncertainties of the times.