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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 not part of the definition of democracy. Since that first edition, the United States has experienced soaring indebtedness, unintended adverse consequences of housing policy, and massive problems in the financial system. Each of these was permitted or encouraged by the incentives of electoral politics and by limitations on government, the two essential features of democratic institutions

Trudi C. Miller died on September 30, 2003, after a brief illness. After earning a BA in English from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she spent most of her career at the National Science Foundation. After a brief stay at the State University of New York at Buffalo, she moved to NSF, where she rose to be the program director for the Decision, Risk and Management Division of Social and Economic Science.

Arguments for rules rather than discretion in macroeconomic policymaking facilitate the understanding of some fundamental issues of democratic theory. This article reviews four such arguments, and relates them to issues of delegation and accountability in representative government.

In a reevaluation of the meaning of politics, it is argued that while economics contains theory & language that can facilitate an understanding of the public interest, it does not provide an escape from political disagreement, whether based on inevitable differences of interest or belief, or on self-serving efforts to advance one cause at the expense of another. As a language of discourse, economics is shown to be compatible with a broader conception of human nature than is sometimes claimed by its practitioners or acknowledged by its critics. 53 References. Adapted from the source document.

Questions the desirability of an annually balanced budget as well as the merit of putting such a provision into the Constitution.