The Encyclopedia provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the subject known as public choice. However, the title would not convey suf- ciently the breadth of the Encyclopedia s contents which can be summarized better as the fruitful interchange of economics, political science and moral philosophy on the basis of an image of man as a purposive and responsible actor who pursues his own objectives as efficiently as possible. This fruitful interchange between the fields outlined above existed during the late eighteenth century during the brief period of the Scottish Enlightenment when...

It is now twenty years since the concept of rent-seeking was first devised by Gordon Tullock, though he was not responsible for coining the phrase itself. His initial insight has burgeoned over two decades into a major research program which has had an impact not only on public choice, but also on the related disciplines of economics, political science, and law and economics. The reach of the insight has proved to be universal, with relevance not just for the democracies, but also, and arguably more important, for all forms of autocracy, irrespective of ideological com plexion. It is not...

Public choice is the study of behaviour at the intersection of economics and political science. The literature on public choice draws from such perspectives as history, philosophy, law and sociology, to analyze political decision making in a social and economic context. The readings in this volume provide an overview of the field.

It is now twenty years since the concept of rent-seeking was first devised by Gordon Tullock, though he was not responsible for coining the phrase itself. His initial insight has burgeoned over two decades into a major research program which has had an impact not only on public choice, but also on the related disciplines of economics, political science, and law and economics. The reach of the insight has proved to be universal, with relevance not just for the democracies, but also, and arguably more important, for all forms of autocracy, irrespective of ideological com plexion. It is not...

Public choice is the study of behavior at the intersection of economics and political science. Since the pioneering work of Duncan Black in the 1940s, public choice has developed a rich literature, drawing from such related perspectives as history, philosophy, law, and sociology, to analyze political decision making (by citizen-voters, elected officials, bureaucratic administrators, lobbyists, and other rational actors) in social and economic context, with an emphasis on identifying differences between individual goals and collective outcomes. Constitutional political economy provides...

Constitutional political economy is a research program that directs inquiry to the working properties of rules and institutions within which individuals interact and to the processes through which these rules and institutions are chosen or come into being. This book makes the case for an approach to constitutional political economy that is grounded in consistent, hard-nosed public choice analysis. Effective institutional design is simply not feasible unless the designers build their structures to withstand rational choice pressures from the political market place. If mean, sensual man is here...

This book offers an analytic history of Britannia (first England and Wales and then Great Britain) over eight hundred years of political turmoil, intermingled with economic stagnation, followed by the engine of the industrial revolution.The book draws on economics, political science, public choice, philosophy and the law to probe in depth into the evolution of Britannia from an impoverished feudal and then post-feudal autocracy into a constitutional monarchy with limited suffrage that provided the fulcrum for industrial and commercial success, making Britannia, by 1884, the richest nation,...