We develop and test an equilibrium model of party structure to account for the large and ever-changing number of political parties that contest Indian state elections. The analysis finds that the number of parties increases with the voting density of state constituencies, the heterogeneity of the state’s electorate, state per capita income and literacy levels, falls with average age while responding

The popular method of ideal point estimation provides empirical legal scholars with spatial representations of the Supreme Court justices that help elucidate ideological inclinations and voting behavior. This is done primarily in one dimension, where politics dominates, though recent work details a second dimension capturing differing attitudes on the authority of various legal actors. This paper explores

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) was notable for his contributions to different fields of Economics, being awarded with the Nobel Memorial Prize in this area in 1986. His methodology is characterized by three fundamental aspects: methodological individualism, a constitutional approach, and a contractarian political philosophy. In this paper, we explore the development of these features in Buchanan’s works

Families produce people. This presents a problem for autocratic regimes. On the one hand, familial production benefits the autocrat by augmenting the future productivity of the labor force. On the other hand, familial production threatens the autocrat by drawing current resources and loyalty away from the collective. This paper presents a theory of autocratic family policy in which the deciding factor

An ‘elite’ party caters to ‘elite’ voters, while a ‘non-elite’ party caters to ‘non-elite’ voters. Now, the ‘elite’ party wants to expand its support base to include ‘non-elite’ voters. It can do so using one of two possible strategies—it can provide them public goods or it can dole out clientelistic benefits to them. We present a probabilistic voting model to study the conditions under which the ‘elite’

This paper reviews the Roman tax collection system since the Late Republic to the Principality, focusing on the transition from the tax-farming system to a more centralized, census-based administration. We attempt to justify this transition according to New Institutional Economic theories (Transaction Cost Economics and Property Rights Theory). The paper argues that, during the Republic, the auction-based

We theoretically investigate how political abstention among certain social groups encourages populist parties to enter the political stage, trying to absorb inactive voters. We design a two-stage game with two established parties and n voters who jointly determine a taxation policy. The electorate is divided into two groups, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Voters’ decisions on whether to participate

This paper investigates the possibility of anarchy achieving a high trade equilibrium via the example of ninja communities in Japan. Initially, ninjas in the mountainous regions of Iga and Kōka were stateless, constantly feuded, and had few opportunities for exchange. With the advent of civil war in the sixteenth century, ninjas’ economic conditions changed. The mercenary market significantly expanded

Traditional antitrust policy was formulated to control pricing and output decisions that were not disciplined by competitive forces, either because of monopoly power or agreements in restraint of trade. Because there is no single criterion for evaluating political policy outcomes, antitrust regulators eventually settled on the “consumer welfare standard,” correctly recognizing that any other standard

This paper utilizes a balanced panel data-set comprising of data on 29 Indian states and Union Territories for the period 2003-2017 for both Legislative Assembly and Parliamentary elections at the state-level to address the following questions. First, whether an incumbent government manoeuvers fiscal policies for opportunistic gains, especially in light of tight electoral competition? Second, whether

This paper appears to be the first to analyse political campaign incentives when the electorate vote at different moments before Election Day, a phenomenon known as early or advance voting. Many jurisdictions accommodate such voting by accepting mail-in ballots or by opening polling places before Election Day. Since politicians can thereby add campaign promises while citizens vote, they have an incentive

Based on the theory of path dependence, we show that legal tradition affects the administrative court’s rulings. It also complements the two other reasons for diversified verdicts: the experience of the judges and courts (specialization) and preference (bias) for one of the parties. This effect is persistent even if the verdicts are controversial and result in serious consequences for a party and when

Every modern and organized country is making progress when its citizens pay their taxes regardless of whether they will be audited or not by the tax authorities. This research attempts to understand the impact of various tax morale related factors on the taxpaying behavior of the exhausted, due to the 10 years long financial crisis, Greek citizens. A new conceptual model is proposed and empirically

Using a sample of 56 countries (28 rich and 28 poor), observed over the period 2004–2013, our paper develops an analysis of the contagion of corruption at the inter-institutional level. More precisely, it examines whether corruption in the justice system is an important factor to explain the expansion of corruption in politics. We find a clear unidirectional causal effect of corruption in the justice

What explains the emergence and persistence of institutions aimed at preventing any ruling group from using the state apparatus to advance particularistic interests? To answer this recurring question, a burgeoning literature examines the establishment of power-sharing institutions in societies divided by ethnic or religious cleavages. Going beyond existing scholarly work focused on these specific settings

David K. Lewis published his brilliant PhD dissertation in 1969, Convention; A Philosophical Study. With a lag, scholarship on David Hume has come to elaborate the similitude between Lewis and Hume on convention. Reading Hume along the lines of Lewis gives us a vocabulary with which we can better appreciate and articulate the innovativeness of Hume’s theory of convention. This study contributes to

The present article explores how liberalism and modern thoughts entered Iran and how they influenced political thought and institutions in contemporary Iran. It also briefly considers how Iran’s traditional religious and historical discourse addressed modernity and liberal constitutional theories that were distinct from its own. During most of the past 150 years, the traditional discourse regarded

In the twenty-first century, democracies are most often weakened, and even die, not by coups but by manipulation from within by democratically-elected officials. Yet, while democratic breakdown has become increasingly common, significant variation exists in the strategies deployed by would-be autocrats. Although some engage in unconstitutional power grabs, an increasing number of incumbents instead

When war broke out in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the government of Ukraine failed to provide adequate defense to maintain its territorial integrity. In the wake of this government failure, several private volunteer efforts arose to meet popular demand for military action against Russian-backed Separatists. These volunteer battalions had to find alternative methods of aligning their incentives with the

Anthropologists, historians, and political economists suggest that private violence—feuding—provides order and enforces agreements in the absence of a state. We ground these accounts in a series of formal models that shows the relationship between feuding, informal arbitration, and formal judicial resolution. Feuding enables cooperation by deterring exploitative behavior, but its ability to do so is

We assess the impact on trust and trustworthiness of a governmental program to compensate victims of forced displacement. All our subjects were eligible to apply for restitution of their land in accordance with the 2011 “Bill of Victims” issued by the Colombian government. The key independent variable of our analysis is whether a subject had obtained land within this or similar programs. Our dependent

Executive term limits are evidently under stress in many jurisdictions. One mode in which they are evaded is through the formal revision or abrogation of a constitution. Such a process accelerates a pernicious cycle in which constitutional non-compliance begets constitutional instability, which in turn begets subsequent non-compliance. Such a non-compliance cycle is a core problem in law, and one that

In the transition to democracy some autocracies transformed to republics while others evolved to constitutional monarchies. The paper inquires how constitutional monarchy is established. It models a hereditary king and a liberal challenger who coexist over a succession of periods and fight for power which brings office rents and the right to decide one’s preferred policy. The outcome of the confrontation

During the first half of the 19th century, Western Texas was a “trap baited with grass” that attracted migrants hoping to farm. When settlers on the wrong side of an unknown, invisible line could not build successful farms, residents in those counties voted to remain in the Union at far higher rates than residents in neighboring counties who could farm. The connection between the vote and economic

This paper reports on an experimental test of the acceptability of the Principle of Accountability. This is a principle of social justice, and states, “individuals should be rewarded for factors under their control […], but not for factors outside their control” (Cappelen and Tungodden (2009)). We specifically ask for acceptability of the principle underlying it, rather than for particular rewards

This paper undertakes a statistical analysis of citations and readership of papers published in the journal Constitutional Political Economy. Its focus is not the usual attempt to assess the relative impact of articles or authors but rather to suggest that readership (downloads) is a more general measure of impact and one that should be given more attention. Downloads are not simply a product of citations;

The Roman Republic was one of the earliest and long-lasting democracies (510-27 BCE). To prevent the creation of dictatorship, it had a system of separation of powers but it failed to protect the Roman Republic. The ultimate cause of the fall of the Roman Republic was due to the immense wealth that Rome accumulated from its empire and the impact this wealth had on Rome’s institutions, especially its

Traditionally, economists and tax theorists justify taxation by means of externalities. In recent years, both scholars and policymakers have begun advocating ‘sin taxes’ on goods whose consumption causes ‘internalities’: unaccounted-for costs that a person imposes on herself, not on others. In this paper, we argue that sin taxes rest on a static model of individual choice. They retain neoclassical

Deliberation may increase the quality of decisions but also necessarily takes time and effort and hence will have costs. But proponents of deliberative democracy as an attractive or superior method for making decisions almost all focus on presumed benefits while in practice ignoring the costs associated with investing time and resources in the process of deliberation. We show that the cost side significantly

The establishment of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism (SDRM) is one of the important issues in the academic debate on a viable constitution for the European Monetary Union (EMU). Yet the topic seems to be taboo in official reform contributions to the debate. Against this backdrop, the article identifies the SDRM interests of key players, including the European Commission, the European Parliament

Here is a full statement of the theory of political parties as long coalitions, ones organized and elected to stick together on all or most legislative votes. The incentive to form, join, and elect them comes from the external cost of simple-majority voting—the central problem of The Calculus of Consent—but more fundamentally from the Paradox of Voting, or cycles of majority preference. I prove that

In a number of works, James M. Buchanan set out a proposal for a ‘demogrant’—a form of universal basic income that applied the principles of generality and non discrimination to the tax and the transfer sides of the scheme and was to be implemented as a constitutional rule outside the realm of day-to-day politics. The demogrant has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, but this article

The enfranchisement of foreigners is likely one of the most controversial frontiers of institutional change in developed democracies, which are experiencing an increasing number of non-citizen residents. We study the conditions under which citizens are willing to share power. To this end, we exploit the unique setting of the Swiss canton of Grisons, where municipalities are free to decide on the introduction

Multi-year budget frameworks are often considered as instruments for controlling spending, including in the context of the European Union. This paper shows that the effects of multi-year budgeting depends on several conditions, some of which, may lead to more rather than less spending. The analysis is based on a model of a finance minister’s decision to enforce a previously accepted budget ceiling

Why did enduring traditions of economic and political liberty arise in Western Europe? An answer to this question must be sought at the constitutional level. Within the medieval constitutional order, traditions of representative and limited government developed through patterns of constitutional bargaining. The politically fragmented landscape that emerged following the decline of the Western Roman

The institutional design of democratic regimes has attracted much attention from a legal and political perspective, because it affects the actual distribution of power among political actors and the effectiveness of their decisions. The article advances a classification of the democratic institutional design, with particular reference to the triangular interactions among Presidents, Governments, and

In Japan, the disclosure ordinance has been drastically enacted during the—1999–2010. Using an originally constructed panel dataset consisting of approximately 1700 local governments for 1999–2010, we empirically examined the influence of information disclosure ordinances on the income of chief executives in local Japanese governments. Furthermore, we also investigated how the effect of the ordinance

This paper examines how culture influences business regulation across countries. Empirical analysis reveals that individualistic countries adopt fewer regulations than collectivist countries. This result is independent of political institutions, suggesting that culture directly affects regulation by shaping preferences over economic policy. Individualism’s influence is magnified in democratic countries

We examine whether and to what extent political institutions explain different performances in income redistribution across countries. After reviewing the available data sources, the measures of income redistribution and the traditional demand side explanations of redistribution, we focus our analysis on supply side factors, like political and economic institutions, rent seeking processes and the resources

Just as its constitutional development is characterised by frequent change and substantial concentration of power, the Latin American and the Caribbean area is known to host some of the most corrupt countries of the world. A group of countries such as Chile, Barbados and Uruguay, however, report levels of corruption similar to those displayed by most European countries. We ask whether the concentration

Can a lack of transitional justice contribute to democratic backsliding? This paper uses the case of Poland to argue that selective enforcement of transitional justice can be linked to democratic erosion. In doing so, the paper adjudicates between two theories of democratic backsliding. The first, advanced by Milan Svolik, argues that elite polarization drives erosion: when political candidates are

This paper examines the impact of New Zealand’s 1996 adoption of a mixed member proportional (MMP) voting scheme on representation in the legislature, voter turnout, vote volatility and the likelihood of an incumbent party winning re-election. I then consider whether MMP has had any negative consequences for the effectiveness of government policy in relation to fiscal accountability and countercyclical

This paper analyses the impacts of civil society and inequality on the extractive capacity of authoritarian regimes and undertakes a case study of Vietnam. The paper argues that civic groups tend to reduce the extractive capacity of such states, defined as the sum of taxation and rent extraction. This induces the government to substitute rent-extraction for taxation. This hypothesis is tested using

Electoral rules are found to induce different incentives to politicians and have various effects on the economic performance of countries. The literature is however silent on whether this effect is homogeneous across industries within a country. This paper argues with an analytical model that an incumbent government under majoritarian rules tends to favour larger industries so as to secure votes from

It has been empirically observed that reserving seats for leaders belonging to disadvantaged social groups at the local level improves targeting of household public goods to households belonging to these groups. However, it is not clear whether a similar result holds for the allocation of village public goods that have limited spillover effects across households in a village, such as repair and maintenance

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the adoption of turn-taking in office. Turn-taking in office is where two or more individuals are elected to serve individual terms for the same public office, with the exclusive right to exercise the public office rotating among those elected individuals at intervals shorter than the term. Turn-taking enables the benefits of shorter tenures to be realized

In this paper, we examine the relationship between socioeconomic vulnerabilities and due process violations in contemporary Mexico, using a novel survey of imprisoned populations. We further investigate whether institutional reforms—in particular, the 2008 reform that constitutionally mandated the provision of trained public defenders for those without private counsel—help offset the impact of preexisting

We examine the relationship between inheritance rules and voter turnout. Inheritance rules are measured by entailed farms in South Tyrol: land properties whose inheritance is regulated by a law similar to the right of primogeniture. Using data for municipalities between 1998 and 2010, we show that voter turnout is high in municipalities with many entailed farms relative to population. The effect is

Richard E. Wagner has published a multidisciplinary collection of fifty essays written by different scholars in the areas of James M. Buchanan’s wide-ranging work. This volume is so broad in scope, so rich in fascinating reflections, so instructive that anybody should benefit from it who has a genuine, if critical, interest in Buchanan’s work.

Under what circumstances do coalition partners tend to overspend? The so-far dominant explanation relies on the common pool resource theory—the more cabinet members there are, the higher the spending. While theoretically sound, this explanation seems to be more relevant for some cases and less for others. What could lie behind this discrepancy? While the literature to date has focused on institutional

The proposition that constitutional rules serve as permanent, fixed points of interaction is challenged by the existence of contestable rule amendment and the emergence of de facto authority. This observation not only applies to conventional political constitutions, but to the fundamental rules which govern interactions by numerous people using new forms of technology. Blockchain technology aims to

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of left-of-center populist regimes on economic developments in the 21st century in Latin America. In contrast to earlier research, we take account of the price shocks that may also have affected economic development during these regimes’ time in office. In general, we find that left-populist regimes reduced per capita real income in both the short and

Accepting the view that beliefs about the market determine the policies and institutions of economic freedom, this paper considers the cross-country consequences of the fact that these beliefs are not one-dimensional and they may be inconsistently distributed over these dimensions. The paper asks the question of whether cross-country differences in the consistency of market beliefs help explain the

This paper analyzes how governance by true believers differs from that by ordinary idealists and pragmatists. To do so, the paper develops a semi-lexicographic framework for analyzing behavior of persons who have internalized belief systems with “supreme” duties. It uses that framework to analyze the extent to which such duties tend to affect private behavior and demands for public policies. Bernholz’s

Many governments and charities adopt Rawlsian difference principle by maximizing the welfare of the least advantaged and giving priority to equality over efficiency. There are two views about which domain the principle should be applied to. The first applies it to the final distribution of income. Previous empirical studies have focused on this but found little evidence supporting it. The other view

States embracing Islam-based laws are frequently seen as struggling with establishing democratic institutions, jeopardizing human rights and encouraging executive encroachment on the judiciary. This paper explores whether the presence of Islam-based legal language in a domestic legal system is associated with lower levels of electoral democracy, fewer protections for private liberties, women’s rights

While economists have found a positive relationship between norms like generalized trust and economic growth, several scholars outside of economics have argued that there is a tradeoff between economic growth and morality. In particular, they argue that as markets develop, market values, e.g. a focus on money and material possessions, also increase. In this article we empirically test this claim using

This paper examines Hayek's constitutional theory of the liberal state. Hayek argued powerfully that no central planner has sufficient knowledge to run an economy, and that no one has sufficient knowledge to determine ends for others. Pushed to their logical conclusion, these arguments would seem to prescribe the smallest possible state in both scope and size, or perhaps even no state at all. Elsewhere