The intellectual legacy of Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock is one of the world’s leading economists. Even more so than Chicago’s Gary Becker, Tullock has extended the rational choice model into areas previously judged to lie outside the realm of economics. This essay identifies Tullock’s contributions to constitutional political economy, public choice, bureaucracy, the law, and bio-economics. The essay focuses attention most especially on Tullock’s pioneering contributions to public choice, including his twenty-year editorship of Public Choice.     

行政法官在发展社会政策中的作用

<正>行政法官有一种严重的、在一定意义上属于低人一等的情结。①相比于"真正的"法官,他们对自身的地位过度敏感。然而他们在社会中的作用却使其他法官黯然失色。尽管他们的价值常常受到成本—效益(cost effectiveness)的衡量,但最重要贡献却在于社会政策的发展方面。②鉴于行政国家的发展,他们已成为政策发展的关键角色。正如伟大智者詹姆斯·兰迪斯(James Landis)所言:"对行     

The Normative Foundations of Hegemony and The Coming Challenge to Pax Americana

The ongoing reallocation of wealth and power from the West to the “rising rest” promises to produce a new pecking order over the course of the next few decades. Although there is a well-developed body of knowledge on the material dimensions of power transitions, existing scholarship provides a much more embryonic intellectual foundation on the normative dimensions of international change. Transitions in the international distribution of power produce not only novel hierarchies, but also novel brands of international order that rest on the social and ideological proclivities of newly powerful states in the system. This article explores the normative dimensions of hegemony by examining the geopolitical, socioeconomic, cultural, and commercial logics that inform different orders. The normative foundations of hegemony are studied across four great powers: the Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and the United States. The cases reveal that as great powers rise, they as a matter of course seek to push outward to their expanding spheres of influence the norms that provide order within their own polities. Accordingly, today's emerging powers will not embrace the existing international order erected during the West's watch. On the contrary, China and other rising powers will seek to fashion alternative orders based on their own cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic trajectories. If the next international system is to be characterized by a rules-based order rather than competitive anarchy, it will require a new normative consensus that rests on toleration of ideological and political diversity.     

The working of electoral corruption: the Ekiti model of vote buying

Crime, Law and Social Change - In Nigeria, politicians and parties have developed a sophisticated vote-buying scheme, which we label, according to the state, where it happens, the Ekiti model of...     

Global uncertainty,economic governance institutions and foreign direct investment inflow in Africa

Economic Change and Restructuring - Based on the fact that Africa has not fared well in attracting foreign direct investments in the last decade compared to other regions of the world, especially...     

The British Mandate and the crisis of Palestinian landlessness, 1929–1936

This article examines landlessness among Palestinians as a facet of colonial policy in Mandate Palestine before the 1936 revolt. The growth of what was sometimes called a ‘landless class’ came into official view after the violence of 1929. Subsequent investigations indicated that landlessness was a significant problem and that it threatened to destabilize the Mandate. The effort to ameliorate the crisis of landlessness, however, clashed with the dominant colonial conception of settler developmentalism, the notion that Jews, not Arabs, were the agents of modern economic development in Palestine. The first part of this examination revisits the contest over the 1930 White Paper, focusing on its relationship to the advent of mass landlessness. The rapid defeat of the new policy via the MacDonald letter left the landlessness problem to fester while simultaneously obscuring it. As the situation in the Arab countryside continued to deteriorate, the onset of the fifth aliya temporarily reinforced erroneous assumptions about the potential to rectify the problem through the yishuv's development. By the time mass landlessness was ‘rediscovered’ and new land controls designed to protect Arab smallholders were on their way to promulgation in 1935–1936, the Palestinian countryside was just months away from determined revolt.