In 594 BCE, the Athenian lawgiver Solon, called upon to resolve a deepening social crisis, introduced a new constitution and mandated that in civil conflicts, no citizen is to remain apathetic and must take sides. Because the law seemed to support strife, it presents a puzzle. The paper offers a...

The paper derives a complete system of demand equations for public consumption expenditures as the outcome of rational behaviour in a model where government maximizes expected electoral support. The allocation of expenditures is found to depend not only on the prices of public services and total...