James Buchanan’s theory of federalism: from fiscal equity to the ideal political order

Lars Feld

Constitutional Political Economy, 2014, vol. 25, issue 3, 252 pages

Abstract: The distinct characteristic in James Buchanan’s thinking about federalism in contrast to the traditional theory of fiscal federalism is his view about fiscal competition. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this thinking went through three stages. From the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s, his analyses were well embedded in the traditional fiscal federalism literature and concerned with equity and efficiency issues. In the Leviathan approach starting from the mid-seventies, he considered competition between jurisdictions as a means to restrict Leviathan governments. In his interpretation of federalism as an ideal political order, Buchanan binds these perspectives together and adds a procedural view: Federalism enables citizens to exert political control, it raises their interest in politics because one vote has more influence, and it facilitates to act morally within their moral capacity. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: James Buchanan; Fiscal equity; Fiscal competition; Federalism as political order; H77; B31; D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10602-014-9168-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: James Buchanan's theory of federalism: From fiscal equity to the ideal political order (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:25:y:2014:i:3:p:231-252

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-014-9168-9

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().