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The Competitive State

Villa Colombella Papers on Competitive Politics

  • Book
  • © 1991

Overview

Editors:
  1. Albert Breton

    1. University of Toronto, Canada

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  2. Gianluigi Galeotti

    1. University of Perugia, Italy

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  3. Pierre Salmon

    1. University of Bourgogne, France

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  4. Ronald Wintrobe

    1. University of Western Ontario, Canada

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Part of the book series: International Studies in Economics and Econometrics (ISEE, volume 21)

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages I-VII
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  2. Introduction

    1. Introduction

      • Albert Breton, Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, Ronald Wintrobe
      Pages 1-10

  3. Checks and balances in the supply of government policies

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11
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    2. The organization of competition in congressional and parliamentary governments

      • Albert Breton
      Pages 13-38

    3. Political checks and balances and the structure of taxation in the United States and Canada

      • Stanley L. Winer, Walter Hettich
      Pages 39-56

    4. Competition within the Italian public sector

      • Ilde Rizzo
      Pages 57-67

  4. New dimensions of electoral dimension

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 69-69
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    2. The role of deception in political competition

      • Timur Kuran
      Pages 71-95

    3. Policy decisions and the competition for symbolic resources

      • Raymond Breton
      Pages 97-111

    4. The number of parties and political competition

      • Gianluigi Galeotti
      Pages 113-127

    5. Tectonic policies and political competition

      • Robert A. Young
      Pages 129-145

    6. Political competition and the rise of dictatorship

      • Ronald Wintrobe
      Pages 147-165

  5. International aspects of political competition

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 167-167
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    2. Checks and balances and international openness

      • Pierre Salmon
      Pages 169-184

    3. Constitutions as the outcome of imperfect spatial competition

      • Leonard Dudley
      Pages 185-203

  6. Competition and the law

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 205-205
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    2. A competitive model of legal rules

      • Ugo Mattei, Francesco Pulitini
      Pages 207-219

    3. The market for characteristics of property rights

      • Anthony Scott
      Pages 221-255

  7. Back Matter

    Pages 257-275
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Keywords

About this book

I. The concept of competition played a central role in the very first attempts to apply the tools of economics to the analysis of politics. Adopting Hotelling's (1929) industrial organization model of imperfect competition in markets in which space has a predominant role, Downs (1957), following on some perceptive insights of Schumpeter (1942), was able to formulate a model of electoral competition in which political parties, seeking the support of citizens, compete against each other in offering policies designed to elicit their vote. Downs' model and the numerous variants to which it gave birth soon became the major component of what was to become Public Choice Theory. The enormous efforts of the last 30 years devoted to modelling electoral competition have helped improve our understanding of politics and have contributed a basic element that undoubtedly will remain essential to any reasonably complete theory of politics. But whatever may have been early expectations, it is now clear that electoral competition will only be one such element. More recently, the idea of competition has been used to model interest-group behavior. Becker (1983), building on earlier work by Bentley (1908), Truman (1958), Olson (1965), Stigler (1971) and Peltzman (1976), applied the Public Finance analysis of the excess-burden of taxes and subsidies - to which, incidentally, Hotelling (1938) had made pioneering contribution- to produce a model in which competition between interest groups determines an equilibrium distribution of income.

Reviews

All in all, the contributions are very interesting, stimulating, and well written. The book is a valuable supplement to the academic literature, and it should attract the attention of every scholar being interested in the field.
Journal of Economics/ Vol.54 Nr. 3

Editors and Affiliations

  • University of Toronto, Canada

    Albert Breton

  • University of Perugia, Italy

    Gianluigi Galeotti

  • University of Bourgogne, France

    Pierre Salmon

  • University of Western Ontario, Canada

    Ronald Wintrobe

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Competitive State

  • Book Subtitle: Villa Colombella Papers on Competitive Politics

  • Editors: Albert Breton, Gianluigi Galeotti, Pierre Salmon, Ronald Wintrobe

  • Series Title: International Studies in Economics and Econometrics

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0645-7

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7923-0835-5Due: 30 November 1990

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-94-010-6775-1Published: 28 September 2011

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-009-0645-7Published: 06 December 2012

  • Series ISSN: 0924-5170

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: VII, 275

  • Topics: International Economics, Public Economics, Economic Policy

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