Five Questions: An Integrated Research Agenda for Public Choice

All societies, political or academic, must choose among alternatives; these choices can be good, or bad. The worst choice may be looking for“answers” before there is consensus, or at least a debate, on what the real questions should be. Five “real” questions are offered here, in an integrated research agenda for Public Choice. My premis is that there is a single, fundamental human problem: Construct or preserve institutions that make self-interested individual action not inconsistent with group welfare. All social science research is either a distraction, or a step toward understanding at least one of five questions: (1) What are Preferences? (2) What are feasible Alternatives? (3) How much does the form of Implementation affect the way alternatives are valued? (4) How do alternatives chosen Today affect the Menu of alternatives available in the Future? (5) What is Good? How would we know if some outcomes are better than others?

     

Proportional Representation with Citizen Candidates

We construct a simple model incorporating bothcitizen-candidates and proportional representation andinvestigate its properties in a basic case with auniform distribution of citizen ideal points and purepolicy motivations, and in further cases which allowof office rents and other distributions ofpreferences. The idea of citizen-candidates, developedby Osborne and Slivinski (1996), Besley and Coate(1997), endogenises the decision to stand as acandidate and allows explicit study of the number andtype of candidates as an equilibrium phenomenon. Theidea of proportional representation allows a moreflexible relationship between the pattern of votescast and the final policy outcome, and also providesa richer model of political representation. Ourdiscussion points to the widespread possibility ofequilibria involving non-median policy outcomes;provides insights into the relationship betweenproportional representation and the equilibrium numberof candidates; and also provides an explicit accountof the trade-off between candidate benefitsdistributed on a winner-take-all basis and those thatare mediated through proportional representation.     

Staatslehre und Kritik der Moderne: Voegelins Auseinandersetzung mit Ideologien und Autoritarismus in den dreißiger Jahren

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Emerging combatants, war crimes and the future of international humanitarian law

The purpose of this paper is to examine the traditional paradigm of international law that regulates warfare and defines criminal behavior,and examine how the emergence of new actors has changed the environmentof armed conflict. The existing paradigm takes into account state actorsand insurgents who have recognizable political goals. All such combatantshave some stake in the existing international political system and somemeans are available (military intervention, war crimes trials) to compeltheir compliance with the law. However, new categories of combatants areemerging. They are not connected to states, may have no political goalsand are difficult to reach or persuade with time-tested methods.Compelling or persuading them to better compliance with the law is essential to protect vulnerable populations from their depredations.The paper concludes by identifying some contributions that criminologistscan make toward understanding these groups and devising strategies to meetthe challenge of war crimes. Those contributions by criminologists wouldbe equally valuable in dealing with the problem of war crimes and ``traditional' combatants.     

The Evolution of the Centre-right and the State of Scottish Conservatism

This article considers the decline of Scottish Conservatism, 1951–97. The statistical data indicate that 91 percent of the variance in Tory support is accounted for by an underlying negative trend against time, that similar patterns appear when the data is disaggregated by region, and that short-term fluctuations have been more in conformity with English results than is conventionally understood. The process of generational change is seen as a waning of the cultural conditions which produced the centre-right coalition that dominated Scottish politics, 1931–64, and its fragmentation into Conservatism, Liberalism, and Scottish Nationalism. The changed circumstances are not seen as peculiarly Scottish, but the consequences for Scottish Conservatism of an evolution affecting the centre-right across the United Kingdom.