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Since the works by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. von Hayek in the 1920s, the Austrian School of Economics has developed a unique analysis of how the interventions by governments may cause problems, which in turn may lead to calls for further intervention. The Austrian concept of how such a dynamic of interventionism may evolve has however never been very influential outside the Austrian School nor been widely applied for empirical studies. This volume seeks to bring together economists and political scientists with perspectives from both Austrian and public choice analysis so as to further enrich and apply the Mises-Hayek logic, as well as critically assess its value

What is the status of rational choice theory in contemporary European political science? Compared with a quarter-century ago, the rational choice approach is still far from being the paradigm of work in the discipline, but looking at both anecdotal evidence and information derived from journal citations and textbook contents, it seems that the number of political scientists working wholly or partly within the approach has grown markedly, and that its contribution to the mainstream of the field is strong.

The manner in which US presidential elections are organized make them ripe for empirical manifestations of the "voting paradoxes" identified by social choice theorists. This note illustrates the general point with polling data involving the two leading Democrats and the three leading Republicans at the beginning of the 2016 presidential primaries, suggesting that all five candidates may be alternatives in one or more cyclical majorities, i.e., where no candidate cannot be beaten by at least one other

All democratic systems are theoretically open to so-called election inversions, i.e., instances wherein a majority of the decision makers prefer one alternative but where the actual outcome is another. The paper examines the complex 1975 Danish government formation process, which involved five rounds of negotiations and at least five competing alternatives. We demonstrate that in terms of party preferences the final outcome was not the Condorcet winner but rather one that could have been beaten by at least three other government alternatives in head-to-head comparisons. The Danish procedural system of 'negative' parliamentarism combined with simple plurality rule to produce the electoral inversion. Adapted from the source document.

We investigate the possible explanations for variations in aggregate levels of participation in large-scale political demonstrations. A simple public choice inspired model is applied to data derived from the annual May Day demonstrations of the Danish labor movement and socialist parties taking place in Copenhagen in the period 1980-2011. The most important explanatory variables are variations in the weather conditions and consumer confidence, while political and socio-economic conditions exhibit no robust effects. As such accidental or non-political factors may be much more important for collective political action than usually acknowledged and possibly make changes in aggregate levels of political support seem erratic and unpredictable. Adapted from the source document.