Product Description: Democracy is widely accepted today as the most suitable form of government. But does democracy always produce good government? Although often associated with the existence of competitive elections, theory and experience suggest that this insufficiently determines democracy's effectiveness...read more

Product Description: The distinguishing feature of this collection by well-known economists and political scientists from North America, Europe, and Australia is to propose a variety of explanations that all insist on the rationality of extremism. The authors identify four core issues in the study of extremism: the nature (definition) of extremism and its origins in both democratic and authoritarian settings, the capacity of democratic political systems to accommodate extremist positions, the strategies (civil disobedience, assassination, lynching) chosen by extremist groups, and the circumstances under which extremism becomes a threat to democracy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Why is nationalism so widespread today? How does the phenomenon arise? This collection of essays by leading social scientists tries to answer these questions at the forefront of contemporary political discussion. The work differs from others in that the authors' responses are not based on avowed ideological perspectives but are rather drawn from rational-choice analysis...read more

Product Description: In this collection of essays, attention is given to basic issues about democracy that, in spite of their high practical relevance, tend to be taken for granted and not seriously addressed. What should be expected or not expected from democracy? What are the conditions for democracy to be stable? What is the relationship between democracy and economic growth, income distribution, social policies, and the efficiency of public administration? Although broad and potentially contentious, these questions are treated both professionally and thoughtfully and on the whole with little ideological bias...read more

Product Description: The volume examines how different countries define and address environmental issues, with specific attention to intergovernmental relations: what institutions have been created, what assignment of powers have been chosen or have emerged, what solutions have been tried and with what success...read more

Product Description: This book provides a theory capable of explaining the patterns of public expenditures and taxation that occur under representative government. Economists and political scientists have come to realize that issues of public policy and public finance cannot be solved on the naive assumption that these are problems tackled by a government that exists only to serve the public good...read more

Product Description: The purpose of this book is to formulate economic models of the advantages and costs of transparency in various areas of public sector activity and to assess what level of obfuscation in politics is rational. The chapters are arranged in four parts...read more

Product Description: Bijuralism or multijuralism - the presence of two or more legal systems in one legal order - is a widespread phenomenon, but one that has received very little scholarly attention. This is surprising once we recognize that problems associated with bi- or multijuralism appear whenever contracting parties to a transaction are located in jurisdictions that have different legal systems...read more

Product Description: The essays in this volume share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the new understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions or arrangements, and the response of governments and overarching institutions of globalization...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: I. Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote...read more

Product Description: I. The concept of competition played a central role in the very first attempts to apply the tools of economics to the analysis of politics. Adopting Hotelling's (1929) industrial organization model of imperfect competition in markets in which space has a predominant role, Downs (1957), following on some perceptive insights of Schumpeter (1942), was able to formulate a model of electoral competition in which political parties, seeking the support of citizens, compete against each other in offering policies designed to elicit their vote...read more

Product Description: In this work the authors present a general theory of bureaucracy and use it to explain behaviour in large organizations and to explain what determines efficiency in both governments and business corporations. The theory uses the methods of standard neoclassical economic theory...read more