Perfecting Parliament

Roger D. Congleton is Professor of Economics and Senior Research Associate, Center for Study of Public Choice, at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, where he has taught since 1988. His research focuses on the political economy of constitutions and public policy. Professor Congleton's most recent books include 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking (two edited volumes, 2008), which surveys the theoretical and applied literatures on rent seeking; Democratic Constitutional Design and Public Policy (2006), which surveys the empirical literature on the effects of democratic constitutional design on public policies and economic growth; Improving Democracy through Constitutional Reform (2003), which analyzes the effects of constitutional reform on policies and economic developments within Sweden during the past two centuries; and Politics by Principle Not Interest (Cambridge University Press, 1998, written with Nobel prize winner James Buchanan), which analyzes how a generality rule can improve the performance of democratic governments. In addition to his books, Professor Congleton has published more than 100 papers in academic journals and edited volumes on such topics as the politics of constitutional reform, the importance of information in democratic decision making, the emergence and significance of norms, and analyzed policy-making within national governments and international organizations.

• 1. On the origins of Western democracy; 2. Team production, organization, and governance; 3. Organizational governance in the long run; 4. The origins of territorial governance; 5. Constitutional exchange and divided governance; 6. The power of the purse and constitutional reform; 7. Suffrage without democracy; 8. Ideology, interest groups, and adult suffrage; 9. Setting the stage: philosophical, economic and political developments prior to the nineteenth century; 10. Liberalism and reform in the transformative century; 11. Fine-grained constitutional bargaining; 12. An overview of British constitutional history: the English king and the medieval parliament; 13. Constitutional exchange in England: from the Glorious Revolution to universal suffrage; 14. The Swedish transition to democracy; 15. Constitutional reform in the Netherlands: from republic to kingdom, to parliamentary democracy; 16. Germany: constitutional exchange in an emerging state during the nineteenth century; 17. The Japanese transition to democracy and back; 18. The United States, an exception or further illustration?; 19. Quantitative evidence of gradual reform; 20. Ideas, interests, and constitutional reform; Appendix: methodological approach, limits, and extensions.

'If we know how we got here, we know more about how to proceed. This book is a comprehensive effort to help us understand the evolution of the political institutions of Western democracies. The analysis is generalized across several countries with separate but comparable histories. Emphasis is on peaceful processes of institutional development as opposed to romanticized revolutionary change. An exemplary exercise in explanatory social science.' James M. Buchanan, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1986, George Mason University