Talmudic Law requires a minimal supermajority (13 out of 23) for conviction, but at the same time, provides that a unanimous conviction leads to a mistrial. We derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for sincere and strategic voting and show that under the Talmudic rule, the probability of the first type judicial error is lower than that computed by Feddersen and Pessendorfer (Am Polit Sci Rev

A new case for immigration restrictions argues that migrants may transmit low productivity to their destination countries by importing low-quality economic institutions. Using the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) as a natural experiment, we test whether the legalization of undocumented immigrants affects the quality of state-level economic institutions in the United States. Using synthetic

Rejecting all knowledge claims concerning right and wrong in matters practical James Buchanan concurred with legal positivism that invalid law cannot be identified by its substantive content but only by an inherited defect in its factual creation. Beyond correct creation Buchanan proposed as a quasi-natural law constraint that unanimity in the shadow of individual veto power must at least be conceivable

In this study, we address the issue of whether trust enhances institutional quality. Despite accumulated research on the topic, comparative studies examining whether such a relationship holds across different regions are rare. Consequently, in this study, we focus on the heterogeneous effect of trust on the protection of property rights worldwide. According to our research, in Western democracies,

Public choice scholars have attended only modestly to issues in public health. We expect that to change rapidly given the Covid-19 pandemic. The time therefore is ripe for taking stock of public-choice relevant scholarship that addresses issues in public health. That is what we do. Our stock-taking highlights three themes: (1) Public health regulations often are driven by private interests, not public

Despite abundant evidence regarding the influence of US state-imposed tax and expenditure limitations on local governments, the causes and consequences of local overrides remain largely unexplored. This article comprehensively examines the fiscal effects of local overrides of Massachusetts’s state-enforced property tax limit. Existing evidence has shown that pressure from powerful local interest groups

Voting algorithms are used to choose candidates by an electorate. However, voter participation is variable and uncertain, and projections from polls or past elections are uncertain because voter preferences may change. Furthermore, electoral victory margins are often slim. Variable voter participation or preferences, and slim margins of decision, have implications for choosing a voting algorithm. We

With participation quorums present in elections and referendums, supporters of the status quo have to decide whether to vote against the proposition or boycott it by abstaining altogether to achieve the same result. This paper examines why one strategy or the other is implemented, using data from recall elections in 376 Peruvian municipalities mandating a 50% participation quorum to validate the removal

In the European Union right-wing and left-wing populist parties are increasingly becoming stronger. Meanwhile in Central and Eastern Europe autocracies are emerging and becoming stabilized. Italy and Hungary are two notable examples of these processes. Italy is the only country in Western Europe where a coalition of purely populist parties won an election, while Hungary has the most mature autocracy

Do informed electorates choose better candidates? While that question is straightforward, its answer often is elusive. Typically, candidate-quality information is neither salient nor subject to exogenous change. We identify a natural experiment within a non-political election setting that is transparent and features exogenous change in the candidate-quality information frontier. The setting is Major

Perhaps the most important element of James Buchanan’s contribution to constitutional economics is his differentiation between pre- and post-constitutional levels of decision-making. At first glance, a tension may appear between those two levels of analysis. In one, the rules by which we live are up for debate, allowing us to exercise our creative and imaginative capabilities in constitutional construction

Constitutional democracy is in decline and many would-be autocrats try to transgress constitutional constraints. Here, we introduce the concept of militant constitutionalism, which suggests a number of constitutional rules that could make constitutions more resilient to attempts to undermine them. A first empirical evaluation, however, can link only few constitutional paths to enhanced constitutional

In 2008, as the financial crisis unfolded in the United States, the banking industry elevated its lobbying and campaign spending activities. By the end of 2008, and during 2009, the biggest political spenders, on average, received the largest bailout packages. Is that relationship causal? In this paper, I examine the effect of political connections on the allocation of funds from the Troubled Asset

In an article published in 2016, János Kornai proposes to add a third form of governance between democracy and dictatorship to his binary model of system paradigm. It is an autocratic capitalist system, marked by the dilution of the principle of the separation of powers in favor of a strongman and an institutionalized clientelism. This paper proposes to analyze Kornai’s third modality of economic and

The constitutional political economy (CPE) approach as developed by James Buchanan places emphasis on supermajority rules—in particular, a unanimity requirement for constitutional change. Critics argue that this approach “privileges the status quo” in two problematic ways: (1) alternatives are treated unequally, because the status quo requires a smaller coalition to be “chosen” than any other institutional

This paper takes a closer look at how the relation between liberalism and democracy has been addressed by different strands of the liberal tradition. Its purpose is to argue in support of two claims. Firstly, the claim that discourse on what the two ideals are about, and how they are related to one another, has been impaired by a failure to pay due attention to the distinction between the question

The paper asks whether Walter Eucken, the founder of German ordoliberalism, should be considered to be a proponent of authoritarian liberalism. That term originally refers to a proposal for economic liberalization advanced by Carl Schmitt in 1932. Authoritarian liberalism also could be taken to mean that Eucken favors the rule of law and economic freedoms, but rejects democratic decision making. Both

Rules are central to the constitutional political economy (CPE) approach. On this approach, rules, of a variety of types and forms, are necessary for the emergence of a political and social order, so that all genuine political order is rule-based. The central role of rules within the CPE approach is examined starting from an explicit definitional discussion of the concept of a rule and including discussion

I investigate how the third wave of democracy influenced national defense spending by reference to a panel of 110 countries over the 1972–2013 period. I apply new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on military expenditures, which has been extended to years prior to 1988, and four democracy measures to address differences among indices of democracy. The results from a dynamic

In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, a battle of ideas emerged over whether ordoliberalism is part of the cause or the solution of economic problems in Europe. While German ordoliberals argued that their policy proposals were largely ignored before, during and after the crisis, critics saw too much ordoliberal influence, especially in form of austerity policies. We argue that neither view is entirely

Networks underlie notable cases of rapid development without democratic institutions, a phenomenon known as crony capitalism that has two distinctive features: (1) dispensation of selective privileges, and (2) social connections among beneficiaries. This paper advances a formal theory that explains how crony networks can induce large-scale effects that can both propagate risk of predation and incentivize

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 intergovernmental grants whose allocations are determined by legislators. The executive branch cannot interfere with the destinies or volumes of grants, but it can control the transfer pace. We group the data into municipalities and estimate

Does the desirability of social institutions for public goods provision depend on the extent to which they include mechanisms for endogenous enforcement of cooperative behavior? We consider alternative institutions that vary the use of direct punishments to promote social cooperation. In one institution, subjects participate in a public goods experiment in which an initial stage of voluntary contribution

During recent decades, terrorist groups have sought refuge in weak or failed states from which to launch their attacks. Foreign aid to states harboring those groups may or may not be an effective counterterrorism strategy. The current paper investigates that strategy from resident terrorist groups’ perspectives while accounting for their ideologies. In particular, we investigate how conflict aid and

Parents who experience poverty and who want to provide their children with an escape route can be expected to encourage and support their progeny’s education. The evidence that Roma parents behave differently is unsettling. In this paper we test empirically an explanation for that behavior. The explanation is based on a theory (Stark et al. 2018) that can be “borrowed” to rationalize the enforcement

The aim of this article is to help explain the history of the public spending-to-GDP ratio in France by examining the production of laws and regulations. It empirically finds a positive and significant relationship between the number of pages in the Official Gazette of the French Republic and the development of the public expenditure-to-GDP ratio. We rely on the number of pages in the Official Gazette

The story of Ulysses and the sirens has been used to portray the theme of the field of constitutional political economy. Indeed, Ulysses adorns the cover of the field’s journal. I compare Ulysses and the prophet Jonah as constitutional allegories. The behavior of Ulysses does not transfigure to a constitution consistent with public-choice premises, while the behavior of Jonah does. A constitution transfigured

Under quadratic voting people are able to buy votes with money. The claims that rational voters will make efficient electoral choices rest on assumptions about how voters acquire and share information. Specifically, that all voters share common knowledge about the probability that any one of them will be the decisive voter, but do not (appear to) share knowledge in any specialized way within special

Plurality rule selects whichever alternative is most preferred by the greatest number of voters. The majoritarian principle states that if a simple majority of voters agree on the most preferred alternative, then it must be selected uniquely. Lepelley (RAIRO-Recherche Opérationnelle 26: 361–365, 1992) adopts a proof by contradiction approach to show that plurality is the only scoring rule satisfying

This article was published in Public Choice 185:1-2 and is part of the “Special Issue of Public Choice in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Peter Bernholz/Edited by Arye L. Hillman and Heinrich W. Ursprung”.

This article was published in Public Choice 185:1–2 and is part of the “Special Issue of Public Choice in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Peter Bernholz/Edited by Arye L. Hillman and Heinrich W. Ursprung”.

All of the major religious confessions existing today have outlasted every single secular ruling regime known in human history. That observation poses an interesting puzzle for social scientists interested in institutional durability. If religions can be seen as governance institutions that organize and coordinate people’s lives, why have they outlasted secular states? Despite claims regarding the