 Some Lessons on the Efficiency of Democracy from a Study of DictatorshipRonald Wintrobe
Chapter 2 in The Political Dimension of Economic Growth, 1998, pp 20-37 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract In recent years there has been a great deal of new work on the efficiency of democracy. The most important contributions have probably been the literature on probabilistic voting,1 ‘the rational partisan model’ originated by Wittman (1983) and developed further by Alesina (1988) and others, and the ‘new institutional economics’, especially that applied to bureaucratic theory (Breton and Wintrobe, 1975 and 1982; Weingast and Moran, 1983) which has tended to displace the old literature on the inefficiency of bureaucracy. However, all these models, like the older median voter model or the Stigler-Peltzman-Olson-Becker interest group approach, have been developed without reference to nondemocratic regimes. It is odd that economists have spilled so much ink modelling monopoly in the private sector, where it is a relatively trivial problem, while hardly any effort has been exerted2 modelling monopoly in politics, where it is probably the most important problem in the social sciences. Keywords: Political Economy; Public Choice; American Political Science Review; Bidding Process; Probabilistic Vote (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-26284-7_2 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26284-7_2 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in International Economic Association Series from Palgrave Macmillan |
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