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Leadership or Chaos
Combining elements of economic reasoning and political science has proven to be very useful for understanding the broad variation in economic development around the world. In a sense research in this field goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment and Adam Smith’s original plan in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. Leadership or Chaos by Norman Schofield and Maria Gallego is intended as an advanced, self-contained text in political economy dealing with social choice. The theory and empirical analysis are used to examine democratic institutions and elections in the developed world, and the success or failure of moves to democratization in the less developed world. The book closes with a consideration of current quandaries with regard to political and economic stability and climate change and a discussion of the moral foundations of our society.
Multiparty Democracy
This book adapts a formal model of elections and legislative politics to study party politics in Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. The approach uses the idea of valence, that is, the party leader's non-policy electoral popularity, and employs survey data to model these elections. The analysis explains why small parties in Israel and Italy keep to the electoral periphery. In the Netherlands, Britain, and the US, the electoral model is extended to include the behavior of activists. In the case of Britain, it is shown that there will be contests between activists for the two main parties over who controls policy. For the recent 2005 election, it is argued that the losses of the Labour party were due to Blair's falling valence. For the US, the model gives an account of the rotation of the locations of the two major parties over the last century.
Architects of Political Change
This work offers a set of extended interpretations of Madison's argument in Federalist X of 1787, using ideas from social choice theory and from the work of Douglass North, Mancur Olson, and William Riker. Its focus is not on rational choice theory itself, but on the use of this theory as a heuristic device to better understand democratic institutions. The treatment adapts a formal model of elections to consider rapid constitutional change at periods when societies face quandaries. The topics explored in the book include Britain's reorganization of its fiscal system in the eighteenth century to prosecute its wars with France; the Colonies' decision to declare independence in 1776; Madison's argument about the 'probability of fit choice' during the Ratification period of 1787-88; the argument between Hamilton and Jefferson in 1798–1800 over the long run organization of the US economy and the election of Lincoln in 1860.
The Spatial Model of Politics
Using unique and cutting-edge research, Schofield a prominent author in the US for a number of years, explores the growth area of positive political economy within economics and politics. The first book to explain the spatial model of voting from a mathematical, economics and game-theory perspective it is essential reading for all those studying positive political economy.
Social Choice and Democracy
The mathematical theory of voting has intellectual roots extending back two centuries to the writings of Borda and Condorcet. Yet it has only been in the last forty years that general theorems have begun to emerge. With the publication of this volume, Norman Schofield brings the results together in a ,common framework. SOCIAL CHOICE AND DEMOCRACY, however, is not merely a synthetic exercise, for Schofield's own work over the last decade has constituted a major initiative in deepening and' broadening our general understanding of voting arrangements. At last the results of his research, bits and pieces of which have been reported in a number of journals of international standing and in various collections, are coherently and systematically presented as an entirety. For students of democracy -- chiefly philosophers and political scientists, but increasingly economists as well -- the insights of this volume are profound. From it I infer the following.
Advances in Political Economy
This book presents latest research in the field of Political Economy, dealing with the integration of economics and politics and the way institutions affect social decisions. The focus is on innovative topics such as an institutional analysis based on case studies; the influence of activists on political decisions; new techniques for analyzing elections, involving game theory and empirical methods.
Collective Decision-Making:
In the last decade the techniques of social choice theory, game theory and positive political theory have been combined in interesting ways so as to pro vide a common framework for analyzing the behavior of a developed political economy. Social choice theory itself grew out of the innovative attempts by Ken neth Arrow (1951) and Duncan Black (1948, 1958) to extend the range of economic theory in order to deal with collective decision-making over public goods. Later work, by William Baumol (1952), and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962), focussed on providing an "economic" interpretation of democratic institutions. In the same period Anthony Downs (1957) sought to model representative de...
Mathematical Methods in Economics and Social Choice
In recent years, the usual optimisation techniques have been extended to incorporate more powerful topological and differential methods, and these methods have led to new results on the qualitative behaviour of general economic and political systems. The progression of ideas presented in this book will familiarize the student with the geometric concepts underlying these topological methods, and, as a result, make mathematical economics, general equilibrium theory, and social choice theory more accessible.
