The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice provides a comprehensive overview of the research in economics, political science, law, and sociology that has generated considerable insight into the politics of democratic and authoritarian systems as well as the influence of different institutional frameworks on incentives and outcomes. The result is an improved understanding of public policy, public finance, industrial organization, and macroeconomics as the combination of political and economic analysis shed light on how various interests compete both within a given rules of the games and, at times, to change the rules. These volumes include analytical surveys, syntheses, and general overviews of the many subfields of public choice focusing on interesting, important, and at times contentious issues. Throughout the focus is on enhancing understanding how political and economic systems act and interact, and how they might be improved. Both volumes combine methodological analysis with substantive overviews of key topics. This first volume covers voting and elections; interest group competition and rent seeking, including corruption and various normative approaches to evaluating policies and politics. Throughout both volumes important analytical concepts and tools are discussed, including their application to substantive topics. Readers will gain increased understanding of rational choice and its implications for collective action; various explanations of voting, including economic and expressive; the role of taxation and finance in government dynamics; how trust and persuasion influence political outcomes; and how revolution, coups, and authoritarianism can be explained by the same set of analytical tools as enhance understanding of the various forms of democracy.

"This two-volume collection provides a comprehensive overview of the past seventy years of public choice research, written by experts in the fields surveyed. The individual chapters are more than simple surveys, but provide readers with both a sense of the progress made and puzzles that remain. Most are written with upper level undergraduate and graduate students in economics and political science in mind, but many are completely accessible to non-expert readers who are interested in Public Choice research. The two-volume set will be of broad interest to social scientists, policy analysts, and historians"--

The two volume Oxford Handbook of Public Choice provides a comprehensive overview of the Public Choice literature. Volume 1 covers rational choice models of elections, interest groups, rent seeking, and public choice contributions to normative political economy. It begins with introductory chapters on rational choice politics, the founding of public choice, and the evaluation and selection of constitutions.

The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice provides a comprehensive overview of the research in economics, political science, law, and sociology that has generated considerable insight into the politics of democratic and authoritarian systems as well as the influence of different institutional frameworks on incentives and outcomes. The result is an improved understanding of public policy, public finance, industrial organization, and macroeconomics as the combination of political and economic analysis shed light on how various interests compete both within a given rules of the games and, at times, to change the rules. These volumes include analytical surveys, syntheses, and general overviews of the many subfields of public choice focusing on interesting, important, and at times contentious issues. Throughout the focus is on enhancing understanding how political and economic systems act and interact, and how they might be improved. Both volumes combine methodological analysis with substantive overviews of key topics. This second volume examines constitutional political economy and also various applications, including public policy, international relations, and the study of history, as well as methodological and measurement issues. Throughout both volumes important analytical concepts and tools are discussed, including their application to substantive topics. Readers will gain increased understanding of rational choice and its implications for collective action; various explanations of voting, including economic and expressive; the role of taxation and finance in government dynamics; how trust and persuasion influence political outcomes; and how revolution, coups, and authoritarianism can be explained by the same set of analytical tools as enhance understanding of the various forms of democracy.

Revised edition of the author's Public finance and public policy, 2009.

The purpose of this book is to discuss the issues involved in and to make a contribution to the endogenization of public sector behaviour in macroeconomic models. To that end, the traditional theory of economic policy is critically reviewed as well as the existing literature on the impact of politics on (macro)economic policy. It is argued that Van Windens' interest function approach offers a more useful and valuable entry to the analysis of public sector decision making. It gives a coherent, yet condensed picture of the impact of the various social classes on economic policy. Using this approach an explanatory model of public sector decision making is developed, which yields behavioural equations for public expenditure, public employment and taxation that appear to be suited for insertion in a macroeconomic model. Application of the model to data for the Netherlands shows that the model can be provided with empirical support and that the power structure of society can be proxied by the relative numerical strengths of the economically active social classes. Taking the latter finding for granted, a fully closed model of politico-economic interaction is obtained. The model is further generalized to account explicitly for the social security system and its income transfers, and to allow for multi-period decision making on bond financed budget deficits/surpluses.