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The financial crisis that began in 2008 and its lingering aftermath have caused many intellectuals and politicians to question the virtues of capitalist systems. The 19 original essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe, analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of capitalist systems.

Public choice or rational politics differs from other approaches to the study of political behavior in that it builds on models in which rational individuals seek to advance their own interests. This five-part volume surveys the main ideas and contributions of the field. It contains twenty-five essays written by thirty scholars, both economists and political scientists, from North America and Europe. Part I discusses the nature and justification for the existence of government and various forms it can take, including mixed, private, and public institutions, international organizations, federalisms, and constitutional governments. Part II examines the properties of different voting rules and preference aggregation procedures. Part III explores multiparty systems, interest groups, logrolling and political business cycles. The individual decisionmaker is the focus of Part IV, with surveys of the experimental literature on individual behavior, and why people vote as they do. The final section applies public-choice reasoning to bureaucracy, taxation, and the size of government.

Considerable concern has been expressed in resent years about declines in voter participartion rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates intropuce a "class bias" into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it. Little empirical work exists, however, that measures the effects of lower participartion on the felfare of country. This paper begins to fill this void. It presents cross-national evidence that high level of democratic participartion are associated with more equal distributions of income. The paperś results also imply, however, that this reduction in income inequality comes at a cost. High partcipartion rates are related to larger government sectors which in turn lead to slower economic groth. We also present ecidence of the "capture" of government by upper income groups in Latin and Central American countries.

This work examines how the basic constitutional structure of governments affects what they can accomplish. The author illuminates the links between the structure of democratic government and it achievements, by drawing comparisons between the American and other government systems around the world

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