The essays in this volume share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the new understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions...

G. Galeotti* and M. Marrelli** *Universita di Perugia **Universita di Napoli 1. The economic analysis of optimal taxation has permitted considerable steps to be taken towards the understanding of a number of problems: the appropriate degree of progression, the balance between different taxes, the equity-efficiency trade-off etc .. Though at times considered as abstract and of little use in policy design, the issues it addresses are real ones and very much on the agenda of many countries. As usual in scientific debate, criticisms have contributed to the correct understanding of the theoretical...

The essays in this volume share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the new understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions...

This is a collection of essays by well-known economists and political scientists from both North America and Europe on the nature of democracy.

Why is nationalism so widespread today? How does the phenomenon arise? This collection of essays by leading social scientists tries to answer these questions at the forefront of contemporary political discussion. The work differs from others in that the authors' responses are not based on avowed ideological perspectives but are rather drawn from rational-choice analysis. The collection focuses on three subjects--the origins of nationalism, whether and why it promotes good or evil, and how to deal with its occasional destructive consequences.

The distinguishing feature of this collection by well-known economists and political scientists from North America, Europe, and Australia is to propose a variety of explanations that all insist on the rationality of extremism. The authors identify four core issues in the study of extremism: the nature (definition) of extremism and its origins in both democratic and authoritarian settings, the capacity of democratic political systems to accommodate extremist positions, the strategies (civil disobedience, assassination, lynching) chosen by extremist groups, and the circumstances under which...