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Ginsburg, Tom --- "Public Choice and Constitutional Design" [2010] ELECD 315; in Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne (eds), "Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law

Editor(s): Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206749

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: Public Choice and Constitutional Design

Author(s): Ginsburg, Tom

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

8 Public choice and constitutional design
Tom Ginsburg1


Public choice and the centrality of constitutional design
Constitutional design is a central concern of public choice and its related discipline of
constitutional political economy. Public choice, typically described as the application of
economics to political science, seeks to understand problems of aggregating preferences
in collective decision-making (Mueller 1997; Farber and Frickey 1991). Constitutional
political economy focuses more narrowly on the role of rules in structuring and con-
straining decision-making, shifting the terrain from choice within rules to the choice of
higher order `constitutional' rules. As Brennan and Buchanan (1985, 10) put it, `If rules
influence outcomes and if some outcomes are `better' than others, it follows that to the
extent that rules can be chosen, the study and analysis of comparative rules and institu-
tions become proper objects of our attention.' (For more on the relationship among law
and economics, public choice and constitutional political economy, see Voigt 1997; Van
den Hauwe 2000).
Political constitutions of nation states are only one example of `constitutional' rules
and institutions. They are, however, a particularly central set for public choice scholars
to consider because constitutions are central to the production of public goods. The basic
assumption is that different constitutional schemes can have different incentive effects on
public good production and its paradigmatic challenge of interest group influence. The
research program on optimal constitutional design is now nearly five decades old, and
has incorporated contributions from many different disciplines (see for example, ...