In remembrance of Robert D. Tollison

We discuss the mechanisms related to quadratic voting, from Vickrey’s counter-speculation mechanism and his second-price auction, through the family of Groves mechanisms and its most notable member, the Clarke mechanism, to the expected externality mechanism, Goeree and Zhang’s mechanism, the Groves–Ledyard mechanism, and the Hylland–Zeckhauser mechanism. We show that each mechanism that involves collective decisions has a quadratic aspect and that all of the mechanisms that we discuss are applications of the fundamental insight that for a process to be efficient, all parties involved must bear the marginal social costs of their actions.     

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.     

The Anti-Axial Age

Karl Jaspers famously characterized the period from the beginning of the eighth to the end of the third century before Christ as an “Axial Age” in which intellectual freedom and creativity blossomed as never before. This article argues that it was followed, five hundred years later, by an “Anti-Axial Age”, which devised a novel formula for intellectual and political repression. Its essence was the state’s capture of the millenial narrative, which had first been developed as religious doctrine within Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Involving the two great classical empires of Western Eurasia, Persia and Rome, and then empowering the expansion of Islam, the Anti-Axial Age left an ideological legacy that continues to haunt the contemporary world.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Guidelines for social services grants

Guidelines for spending federal grants to the states for social services changed repeatedly between 1962 and 1975. The process of preparing guidelines changed, and so did their content. These changes are described and explained. Guidelines at all stages failed to provide intelligible and useful instructions to federal and state administrators. In part this was because the contextual supports that normally help to give effect to grant-in-aid guidelines—explicit antecedents in the law, and implicit understandings among administrators at different levels of the federal system—were lacking or seriously defective. Beyond that, in each of their different phases the guidelines proved untenable because of dysfunctions that may have been peculiar to the respective processes by which they were prepared.The trustees, officers, and other staff members of The Brookings Institution have no responsibility for the contents of this paper.