Discusses voting, tax policy, government regulation, redistribution of wealth, and international negotiation in a new approach to government

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The Next 25 Years of Public Choice brings together the perspectives of many of the world's leading scholars of public choice on the present state of knowledge and the likely future course of scholarship on public choice and constitutional economy. This book presents material in a manner accessible to a wide educated readership and will be influential in guiding future research in this important field. It is directed at professional scholars of public choice, economics and political science, government officials, graduate students and anyone seriously interested in public policy. A distinguished group of internationally well-known scholars offer their own often far-reaching views on strengths and weaknesses in the current literature and pinpoint important avenues of research amenable to future research.

Reproduces 26 articles on public choice and public economics by Mueller, written over 20 years. Employing the contractarian-constitutional methodology of public choice, he examines the properties of several voting methods, representational systems and questions of equity and justice.

The Encyclopedia provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the subject known as public choice. However, the title would not convey suf- ciently the breadth of the Encyclopedia’s contents which can be summarized better as the fruitful interchange of economics, political science and moral philosophy on the basis of an image of man as a purposive and responsible actor who pursues his own objectives as efficiently as possible. This fruitful interchange between the fields outlined above existed during the late eighteenth century during the brief period of the Scottish Enlightenment when such great scholars as David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith contributed to all these fields, and more. However, as intell- tual specialization gradually replaced broad-based scholarship from the m- nineteenth century onwards, it became increasingly rare to find a scholar making major contributions to more than one. Once Alfred Marshall defined economics in neoclassical terms, as a n- row positive discipline, the link between economics, political science and moral philosophy was all but severed and economists redefined their role into that of ‘the humble dentist’ providing technical economic information as inputs to improve the performance of impartial, benevolent and omniscient governments in their attempts to promote the public interest. This indeed was the dominant view within an economics profession that had become besotted by the economics of John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson immediately following the end of the Second World War.

This five-part volume surveys the main ideas and contributions to the field of public choice.