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...     

Measuring rent-seeking

Public Choice - Some 30 years ago Gordon Tullock, in his capacity as Editor of Public Choice, made a pointed effort to motivate researchers to measure and quantify resource investments in...     

Islam and democracy: a response

A debate has emerged whether countries with Muslim majorities are intrinsically more likely to be autocratic. Recent studies have traced this to the allegedly repressive nature of Islam. This article replicates the most recent study on this topic, published in Public Choice (Potrafke in Public Choice 151:185–192, 2012), and demonstrates that the effect is not robust to a number of sensible alterations to the statistical specification. The effect between Islam and democracy is spurious. There is no causal relationship between Islam and democracy.     

Industry size and regulation: Evidence from US states

Public Choice - What explains variation in the extent of regulation across US states and industries? We examine cross-sectional variation in state government regulations facing 81 three-digit North...     

Multiwinner approval voting: an apportionment approach

Public Choice - To ameliorate ideological or partisan cleavages in councils and legislatures, we propose modifications of approval voting in order to elect multiple winners, who may be either...     

Terrorism and subjective financial well-being: micro-level evidence from Pakistan

Public Choice - This paper exploits individual-level data on self-reported financial situations and district-level information on terrorist attacks in Pakistan to examine how persistent exposure to...     

Cold bacon: co-partisan politics in Brazil

Public Choice - This paper provides evidence of alignment effects between the executive and the legislative branches of the central government. We rely on detailed data on Brazilian...     

Targeting inflation targeting: the influence of interest groups

Public Choice - We examine whether sectional interest groups influence monetary policy goals in a manner consistent with their interests as distributive coalitions. In particular, we explore...     

William R. Keech: in Memoriam

Public Choice - We analyze the non-contributory health insurance program (“green cards”) in Turkey with RDD (Regression Discontinuity Design) and show that more citizens receive green...     

Academia in Anarchy: 50 years on

Public Choice - In 1970, James Buchanan and Nicos Devletoglou published Academia in Anarchy: An Economic Diagnosis. Even though the book focuses on the industry Buchanan worked in for nearly...     

Correction to: Economic growth and political extremism

Public Choice - We provide the first parcel-level, time-series empirical analysis of municipal annexation behavior. We also exploit a unique natural experiment created by the incorporation and...     

Long swings in the growth of government expenditure: an international historical perspective

Public Choice - Adopting an international historical perspective, this study aims to identify the main empirical regularities in the long-run growth pattern of government expenditure. The...     

The Weak Government Thesis: Some New Evidence

Public Choice - This paper presents new evidence on the hypothesis that coalition governments will find it more difficult to keep their budgets in line after an adverse economic shock than do...     

Dynamic anarchy: the evolution and economics of the beguny sect in eighteenth-twentieth century Russia

Public Choice - The paper investigates the possibility of evolution in superstitions that support self-governance arrangements. To show that superstitions may adapt to changes in economic...     

The value of political connections in the post-transition period: evidence from Czechia

Public Choice - This paper studies the relationship between political connections and reported profits using a newly compiled dataset on all corporate donations to political parties in Czechia...     

Public resource allocation,strategic behavior,and status quo bias in choice experiments

Public Choice - Choice experiments, a survey methodology in which consumers face a series of choice tasks requiring them to indicate their most preferred option from a choice set containing two or...     

Egalitarianism and the democratic deconsolidation: Is democracy compatible with socialism?

Public Choice - The unprecedented reduction in popular support for democracy represents a risk of democratic deconsolidation. The new situation echoes old debates on the compatibility of democracy...     

Party switching and political outcomes: evidence from Brazilian municipalities

Public Choice - Although party switching is a relatively rare event in most countries, the phenomenon is widespread in Brazil. This paper investigates the effects of party switching on political...     

State capacity and public choice: a critical survey

Public Choice - ‘State capacity’ is a term associated with a popular argument in fiscal sociology, history, and political economy regarding the role of the state in the process of...     

Gebhard Kirchgässner, 60 years on

This introductory essay summarizes the contents of the papers presented at a conference in honor of Gebhard Kirchgässner entitled “(Macro-)Economic Policy and Public Choice” which are published in this special issue. In addition to this brief overview on the contributions, this essay relates them to the scientific works of Gebhard Kirchgässner after locating the latter within the realm of Public Choice analysis.