Ulysses and the Rent-Seekers: The Benefits and Challenges of Constitutional Constraints on Leviathan

. A constitutionally constrained government may be viewed as an attractive arrangement in that it may limit the rent-seeking behavior by narrowly motivated special interest groups and instead support policies of a Pareto-improving character. However, the introduction of constitutional constraints may themselves turn out to be problematic, since institutional solutions to suboptimal arrangements presuppose that the agents are capable of overcoming problems of the very nature that the solutions are intended to overcome in the first place. This makes it unlikely that general interest promoting constitutional constraints on governments will be successfully adopted.rent-seeking; constitutions; institutions; self-interest; Prisoners' Dilemma; constraints

Election inversions, coalitions and proportional representation: Examples from Danish elections

When collective choices are made in more than one round and with dif¬ferent groups of decision-makers, so-called election inversions may take place, where each group have different majority outcomes. We identify two ver¬sions of such compound majority paradoxes specifically, but not ex¬clu¬si¬ve¬ly, relevant for systems of proportional representation with governing coalitions: The “Threshold Paradox” and the “Federal Paradox”. The empirical relevance of the two paradoxes is illustrated with examples from three Danish elections (1971, 1990, 2011), where a majority of the voters voted for one bloc of parties but where a majority of the seats fell to another.Social choice; voting paradoxes; electoral systems; election inversions

The constitutional dilemma of European integration

The paper analyzes European integration from a constitutional economics perspective. It is argued that the use of the Prisoners' Dilemma as a description of the advantages of European integration is fallacious. If the situation is a PD, the solution is impossible; if it is not, it is unnecessary.Prisoners Dilemma; constitutions; constitutional economics; public choice; European Union

The constitution of economic growth: Testing the prosperity effects of a Madisonian model on a panel of countries 1980‐2000

Political scientists and economists increasingly agree that institutions may influence economic growth, but there is little general agreement on what institutions tend to produce what consequences. We apply public choice insights for a theoretical analysis that may be termed “Madisonian”: Institutions that divide political power between multiple veto players and institutions that protect private property rights may be expected to have positive effects on economic growth. We analyze data from a panel of countries for the period 1980‐2000 in order to study the relationships, including a series of “extreme bounds” analyses in order to test the robustness of the statistical results. We find that particularly the presence of secure private property has a significant, positive and robust effect on economic growth and that when outliers are excluded a configuration where political power is dispersed among more veto players has a similar effect.Constitutions; democracy; economic growth; veto players; public choice; constitutional economics

Var det fortsat ”the economy, stupid!” i 2016 og 2018?

US elections are often interpreted in an anecdotal and person focused manner by media and commentators, while social science research consistently has found that economic conditions play a very large role, while others play a small one. An analysis US presidential and midterm elections 1948-2018 demonstrate that the presidential election of 2016 and the midterm elections of 2018 generally fits well into a logic that voters hold the presidential party responsible for the economic development, while there also is a cost of ruling

Den ”almene og sammenlignende statskundskab”: Fra kerne over residual til hullet i en vaniljekrans?

The article is a contribution to the 50th jubilee anniversary "festschrift" of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. It surveys the development of the field of political theory/comparative politics (incl. political economy) in the period 1965-2015

Den ”almene og sammenlignende statskundskab”: Fra kerne over residual til hullet i en vaniljekrans?

The article is a contribution to the 50th jubilee anniversary "festschrift" of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. It surveys the development of the field of political theory/comparative politics (incl. political economy) in the period 1965-2015

Ytringsfriheden og dens nyautoritære fjender

The paper develops an argument in favour of freedom of speech inspired by Anthony de Jasay, F.A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and John Stuart Mill and applies it for a criticism of the Danish government's proposal (2023) to ban desecration of "religious items"

It’s the weather, stupid! Individual participation in collective May Day demonstrations

We investigate the possible explanations of variations in aggregate levels of participation in large-scale political demonstrations. A simple public choice inspired model is applied to data derived from the annual May Day demonstrations of the Danish labour movement and socialist parties taking place in Copenhagen in the period 1980-2009. The most important explanatory variables are variations in the weather conditions. Political and socio-economic conditions exhibit few or no robust effects