Empirical Studies in Comparative Politics

This volume presents a collection of papers analyzing the political systems of ten nations. It aims to provoke a conscious effort to compare, and investigate, the public choice of comparative politics. There have been many publications by public choice scholars, and many more by researchers who are at least sympathetic to the public choice perspective, yet little of this work has been integrated into the main stream of comparative political science literature. This work, however, presents an empirically oriented study of the politics, bureaucratic organization, and regulated economies of particular nations in the canon of the comparativist. It therefore provides a public choice view at the level of nations, not of systems. This compendium of work on comparative politics meets two criteria: a model of human behaviour or institutional impact is specified; and this model is confronted with data appropriate for evaluating whether it is useful for understanding politics in one or more nations.