
The Competitive State
Villa Colombella Papers on Competitive Politics
Springer (Publisher)
Published on 28. September 2011
Book
Paperback/Softback
VII, 275 pages
978-94-010-6775-1 (ISBN)
Description
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 / Votes
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
More details
Series
Edition
Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1991
Language
English
Place of publication
Dordrecht
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Research
Illustrations
VII, 275 p.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
441 gr
ISBN-13
978-94-010-6775-1 (9789401067751)
DOI
10.1007/978-94-009-0645-7
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Alb. Breton | P. Galeotti | P. Salmon
The Competitive State
Villa Colombella Papers on Competitive Politics
Book
11/1990
Kluwer Academic Publishers
€96.00
Article not available at the moment
Content
One: Checks and Balances in the Supply of Government Policies.- The organization of competition in congressional and parliamentary governments.- Political checks and balances and the structure of taxation in the United States and Canada.- Competition within the Italian Public Sector.- Two: New Dimensions of Electoral Competition.- The role of deception in political competition.- Policy decisions and the competiton for symbolic resources.- The number of parties and political competition.- Tectonic policies and political competition.- Political competition and the rise of dictatorship.- Three: International Aspects of Political Competition.- Checks and balances and international openness.- Constitutions as the outcome of imperfect spatial competition.- Four: Competition and the Law.- A competitive model of legal rules.- The market for characteristics of property rights.