Public choice economists began studying the economics of anarchy in the 1970s. Since then, the amount of research on anarchy has burgeoned. This article surveys the important public choice contributions to the economics of anarchy. Following the lead of the early public choice economists, many...

Threats of mass revolts could effectively constrain a dictator's public policy if it were not for the collective-action problem. Mass revolts nevertheless happen, but they follow a stochastic pattern. We describe this pattern in a threshold model of collective action and integrate it into an...

Es wird die Grundidee einer direktdemokratischen Plattformpartei vorgestellt, dass die bei ihr registrierten Wähler über alle (wichtigen) Einzelfragen abstimmen dürfen und ihre Abgeordneten sie nicht nach Mehrheitsbeschluss, sondern proportional vertreten. Dazu werden wichtige Varianten, die...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004: This paper models the trade-off between production and appropriation in the presence of simultaneous inter- and intra-group conflicts. The model exhibits a ' group cohesion effect ': if the contest between the groups...

In many situations there is a potential for conflict both within and between groups. Examples include wars and civil wars and distributional conflict in multitiered organizations like federal states or big companies. This paper models such situations with a logistic technology of conflict. If...

Few social scientists have equaled the impact on political science of Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993. His extraordinary influence emanated from his ideas but was also a result of his vast social network of collaborators, students, and friendly...

A country`s judiciary, police, and security forces are essential to protect the State from external aggression. By virtue of the State`s monopoly of coercion, they maintain a stable legal framework and the safety of persons and property. All these activities enhance a society`s productivity, but...

This paper argues that corruption patterns are endogenous to political structures. Thus, corruption can be systemic and planned rather than decentralized and coincidental. In an economic system without law or property rights, a kleptocratic state may arise as a predatory hierarchy from a state...

We assess Gordon Tullock's work on dictatorship and revolutions using a common analytic framework that captures the dynamics of mutually reinforcing perceptions within a potentially rebelling subgroup of a population. We can reconstruct all of Tullock's central findings but we also find him...