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This article discusses Gordon Tullock's impact on the economics profession and on public choice in particular. It measures this impact through his publications, his editorship of the journal Public Choice, and his association with the Center for Public Choice.

Since World War II a large literature has arisen that uses the methodology of economics to examine the behavior of governments and the actors in them. Some scholars refer to their research as public choice, some as social choice, and still others as political economy. This article discusses the distinctions among these three terms. It concludes that all of the research falling under these three headings has much in common, and that people who refer to their work as public choice or political economy are essentially employing identical methodologies. Contributions to public choice, narrowly defined, are more often positive and empirical analyses of government behavior than those in social choice, narrowly defined.

The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this handbook, written by scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems.

Public choice or rational politics differs from other approaches to the study of political behavior in that it builds on models in which rational individuals seek to advance their own interests. This five-part volume surveys the main ideas and contributions of the field. It contains twenty-five essays written by thirty scholars, both economists and political scientists, from North America and Europe. Part I discusses the nature and justification for the existence of government and various forms it can take, including mixed, private, and public institutions, international organizations, federalisms, and constitutional governments. Part II examines the properties of different voting rules and preference aggregation procedures. Part III explores multiparty systems, interest groups, logrolling and political business cycles. The individual decisionmaker is the focus of Part IV, with surveys of the experimental literature on individual behavior, and why people vote as they do. The final section applies public-choice reasoning to bureaucracy, taxation, and the size of government.

This book also emphasizes the difference between religion and science as means for understanding causal relationships, but it focuses much more heavily on the challenge religious extremism poses for liberal democratic institutions. The treatment contains a discussion of human psychology, describes the salient characteristics of all religions, and contrasts religion and science as systems of thought. Historical sketches are used to establish a link between modernity and the use of the human capacity for reasoning to advance human welfare. The book describes the conditions under which democratic institutions can advance human welfare, and the nature of constitutional rights as protectors of individual freedoms. Extremist religions are shown to pose a threat to liberal democracy, a threat that has implications for immigration and education policies and the definition of citizenship

Considerable concern has been expressed in resent years about declines in voter participartion rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates intropuce a "class bias" into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it. Little empirical work exists, however, that measures the effects of lower participartion on the felfare of country. This paper begins to fill this void. It presents cross-national evidence that high level of democratic participartion are associated with more equal distributions of income. The paperś results also imply, however, that this reduction in income inequality comes at a cost. High partcipartion rates are related to larger government sectors which in turn lead to slower economic groth. We also present ecidence of the "capture" of government by upper income groups in Latin and Central American countries.

This work examines how the basic constitutional structure of governments affects what they can accomplish. The author illuminates the links between the structure of democratic government and it achievements, by drawing comparisons between the American and other government systems around the world

This work examines how the basic constitutional structure of governments affects what they can accomplish. The author illuminates the links between the structure of democratic government and it achievements, by drawing comparisons between the American and other government systems around the world.

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