Constitutional Political Economy in a Public Choice Perspective

Constitutional political economy is a research programme 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 text makes the case for an approach to constitutional political economy that is grounded in consistent 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. A 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.