An accessible synthesis of a large body of material, Economic Politics raises and addresses questions about the consequences of democratic institutions for economic performance. Drawing on concrete and observable experience in the United States, with occasional reference to other countries, William Keech suggests that there are modest and bearable costs of democratic procedures, comparable to the agency costs incurred whenever a principal delegates authority to an agent. Democracy, according to Keech, does not systematically cause inferior macroeconomic policy detrimental to a population's...

Employing macroeconomic performance as a lens to evaluate democratic institutions, the author uses models of political behavior that allow for opportunism on the part of public officials and shortsightedness on the part of voters to see if democratic institutions lead to inferior macroeconomic performance. We have learned more about how and why democracy can work well or badly in the years since the first edition was published. It was not previously apparent how much the good performance of democracy in the United States was contingent on informal rules and institutions of restraint that are...