Constitutional political economy in a public choice perspective

Front -- CONTENTS -- Introduction: The relevance of public choice for constitutional political economy -- Positive constitutional economics: A survey -- Toward a new constitution for a future country* -- The balanced budget amendment: Clarifying the arguments -- The prohibition-repeal amendments: A natural experiment in interest group influence* -- Choosing free trade without amending the U.S. Constitution* -- On the (relative) unimportance of a balanced budget* -- Public choice in a federal system -- Subsidiarity and ecologically based taxation: A European constitutional perspective

Constitutional political economy is a research program that directs inquiry to the working properties of rules and institutions within which individuals interact and to the processes through which these rules and institutions are chosen or come into being. This book makes the case for an approach to constitutional political economy that is grounded in consistent, hard-nosed public choice analysis. Effective institutional design is simply not feasible unless the designers build their structures to withstand rational choice pressures from the political market place. If mean, sensual man is here to stay, then let us, in our better moments, incorporate that knowledge into the institutions that must govern his behavior. A distinguished list of public choice scholars pursue this approach against a varying backcloth of constitutional issues relevant to the United States, Canada, Western Europe, the transition economies and the third world