the next twenty-five years of public choice || public choice: what i hope for the next twenty-five...

Public Choice: What I Hope for the Next Twenty-Five YearsAuthor(s): Gordon TullockSource: Public Choice, Vol. 77, No. 1, The Next Twenty-Five Years of Public Choice (Sep.,1993), pp. 9-16Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027202 .

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Public Choice 77: 9-16, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Public choice - What I hope for the next twenty-five years

GORDON TULLOCK Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

Samuel Goldwyn is reported to have said: "Prediction is very hard, particulary for the future." If I look back on my previous predictions of the future for public choice, I find that they were normally wrong. I do not expect my future estimates to be much better. Nevertheless, the editors have asked me to make some guesses, and I am willing to oblige. The reader should keep in mind, however, that that is what they are: guesses.

Indeed, they may be even less than guesses. I have put "Hope" in the title of this essay to indicate that I am not really trying to guess the future. I am saying what I would like it to look like. There are various things I would like to have happen, but whether they will or not is an open question.

First, public choice started as a revolutionary science and with time became a normal science. Although it is now a normal science progressing somewhat slowly, I believe that it is progressing a good deal faster than either standard economics or standard political science. These latter disciplines are what one might even call sub-normal sciences in their rates of growth. I sometimes think that economics is moving backwards.

Let me turn to my wish list. The first is that public choice pays more attention to non-democratic forms of government. We are, at the moment, in an historic high for democracy, but, frankly, I do not think that this is going to be a per- manent phenomenon. Even now, the non-democratically controlled part of the world is still a very large part, though less than half. Traditionally, non- democratic governments have been common and democratic governments scarce. We may go back to that, although I would think it more likely we will go back to the point where both democratic and non-democratic governments are common, but the non-democratic are the more prevalent of the two.

In any event, I feel we need further study of non-democratic systems. Today, most discussion of non-democratic systems consists simply of pointing out that they are not very nice. This is true enough, but not very helpful. We need studies of why they are not very nice, why different kinds of non-democratic government exist, and what their effects are - all of these are subjects to which we should, I think, give attention.

A second area which I think should be looked into is the internal arrange- ments of bureaucracy. A good deal of work has been done indicating that



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bureaucracies are to a considerable extent motivated by the individual benefits of the bureaucrats. It is hard to read about the functioning of bureaucracies, however, and not to feel that that is merely a first step.

We should of course keep in mind that bureaucrats like everybody else will attempt to maximize their own well being, but anyone who pays careful attention to the behavior of bureaucrats realizes that that is by no means all there is to it. Bureaucrats clearly engage in some activity when they could remain completely idle. This may, of course, be because of the fact that they are easily bored, but it seems to me that we should have some better explanation. Fur- ther, they clearly have ideas as to what their part of the government should be doing and attempt to do it, even if that is not what their superiors want. Once again, we should have a better explanation of such behavior than we have.

To continue, the information conditions within the bureaucracy should be amined. Since Downs' first book, we have realized that the voter is rationally ignorant of many things. The bureaucrat is also rationally ignorant, but he rationally has certain types of information and certain type of misinformation. Both these categories have great effects on his behavior, and we know very little about them. I think that is a situation which should be remedied.

The above are areas where, I think, improvements should be made. I would now like to turn to some areas where, as far as I know, we simply have no ideas at all.

The first of these is what I call the growth paradox. Rather by accident, I stumbled on some long-term data on the size of government and the size of GNP for the United States and discovered that, except for war time, from 1790 to 1930 the federal government was 2-3 percent of GNP. After the end of the disturbances of the Depression and World War II, the federal government began growing as a percentage of GNP in an almost straight line way. A fairly steep straight line, in fact, fits the data since the end of the Korean war about as well as a horizontal line did before. The period between 1929 and 1953 is a disturbed period.

Inspired by this, I looked up some other countries, and found that Denmark and Sweden showed the same phenomena except that their basic rate of central government growth was higher and had reached higher levels. In their case the break was clearly in the 1930s. England, where the data goes back to 1640, is a little more difficult. The most war-like country in Europe, the English were almost continuously at war, with the result that the early period of this data is very disturbed. Nevertheless, it looks as if they had a stable level of government, possibly a declining level of government, up to about 1905-1910, when their government began straight-line growth.

Italy, whose data is particularly difficult because during the Fascist period they seem to have been largely imaginary, showed a stable level [excluding the Fascist period] until 1960 and then a very steep rise.



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I know of no theory of government which explains both the long period of stability and then the almost straight-line growth. There are theories that explain the straight-line growth, but they unfortunately depend on characteristics of democracy which democracies share in the period before and after the growth began. They cannot explain both.

There has been a theory of government growth put forward by Buchanan that it is a result of Keynesianism. I do not want to swear that this is not true, but the data certainly do not fit this theory very well. England, Denmark, and Sweden all began their growth before Keynes wrote his famous book. For the United States it is difficult to say when it began, but it looks as if it began before the book had much influence, and Italy, of course, did not begin government growth until 1960.

It seems to me that we should have theory of this growth. I should also say that, although there are not any good data, I believe that the same pattern of a long period of basically level expenditures and then sharp growth would be found true of the dictatorships as well as the democracies. The problem is that there is just not enough data to test it in any countries except the five I have mentioned above. This is clearly a public choice problem, and one to which we have no answer.

There is another choice problem of considerable importance which is not well explained. Beginning in the early 1960s countries began running large peacetime deficits. The United States was a late entrant into this field and has never had a deficit which, as a share of GNP, was at the same level with, let us say, Belgium. Nevertheless, it is a big enough country so that the deficit is quite conspicuous.

Once again, theories are available which explain why democratic governments would run large deficits, but they do not explain why they did not do so up to 1960. Further, as a matter of fact, dictatorships do about as much in the way of running deficits as democracies. All of this is a sharp change from the nineteeth century when one of the arguments for democracy was that it tended to be fiscally conservative whereas royal governments were not.

As the reader may know, I have a theoretical explanation for all of this, but is is a very poor one. Accepting it for the time being, it assumes that most politicians thought that it was literally impossible to run large deficits in peacetime. Whether they meant by that that the voters would throw them out, or they thought there was some kind of scientific rule that made it impossible, I do not know.

If my theory is correct, the politicians in one country accidentally ran a deficit in peacetime and discovered there were no consequences, so they did it again the following year. This is rather like the developments in the United States in the 1970s and 80s. Of course, it occurred much earlier elsewhere.

Other politicians in other countries noticing this development began doing



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the same thing (dictatorships and democracies at about the same rate). I do not claim this is a good theory, but I do claim that no one has offered anything else which fits the available data. It is necessary to produce a theory which fits both dictatorships and democracies and which explains both the long period in which they did not run peacetime deficits and then very large deficits year after year. Of course, not all countries have run such deficits and some of those that did have stopped. This is a further problem for research.

Another mystery to me, in any event, is why Europe and its overseas exten- sions like the United States and Australia has become such a dominant part of the world. Hume talks about the flourishing nature of the Chinese monarchy in 1775. Indeed, in those days no one seemed to think the Chinese were behind the Europeans. It was not just the Chinese. India was at that time in the process of being conquered by England, but nobody thought that it was a backward part of the world. Indeed, one of the reasons for concern about gold flow among those "economists" who were worried about it was the steady flow of gold to the Far East by way of foreign trade. It was not possible for Europe to produce enough goods to pay for the imports from India and China. Even Turkey was in a powerful and advanced state in 1700. The last Turkish attempt to take Vienna occurred during the reign of Louis XIV. The Arab states at this point were mainly dominated by Turkey, but there were other places in the Far East which were thought to be reasonably progressive. No one thought of Thailand, Persia, Burma, or Japan as backward.

All of this changed suddenly. Europe shot up and surpassed all of these other countries and became overwhelmingly the dominant part of the world. Since it is a rather small continent and since the parts of the rest of the world which it not only conquered but settled are products of this expansion, I find this mys- terious and would like to have an explanation.

We will now turn to a completely different problem and one which is essen- tially technical. When we look at the world, we observe that not only are there undemocratic governments, but there is a great deal of variance among democratic governments as well. Most of the non-English speaking world uses some form of proportional representation. Parts of the English-speaking world, Ireland and Australia, use proportional representation, but in their case it is the Hare method which is quite different from the type of proportional representation used by other countries.

We would immediately assume that this makes a considerable difference, but if you look at the data, it is rather hard to differentiate the performance of a country like Germany from that of the United States. It is true that the United States has a smaller government than most of these proportional representation countries, but it is larger than Switzerland, and Switzerland is the purest proportional representation country in the world.

It seems to me that careful investigation of these different forms of govern-



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ment is desirable. In this connection, the widespread use of direct voting by various forms of the referendum on government policies which is so common in Switzerland and California should be included among the subjects studied. With the exception of some rather general statements of my own, there has been no investigation of these different forms of government or efforts to make comparative analyses. I think this is a major problem and would like to have people investigate it.

Of course, I favor the demand-revealing process. Politically, it does not seem likely that it will be adopted any time in the near future, but I think it is highly desirable that examination of it be included in any comparative study of different voting methods. This will at least keep the idea alive, and will improve our knowledge in an area which I, at least, think is important.

I favor the two-chamber legislature, one of which is elected by proportional representation and the other by single-member or constituency system. It should be admitted, however, that the basic reason I am in favor of this is not a careful study of either of these, but a desire simply to have two houses which are elected in radically different ways. A single house voting by a 60%/ majority was suggested in a proposed amendment to the Constitution for some fiscal measures. It just barely missed being passed by Congress. I think it would be about equally effective.

In practice, there are not just these two different methods of voting. As a matter of fact, when one looks at these things in detail, the methods of voting vary immensely. Proportional representation means different things in the Netherlands than in Switzerland.

Further, single-member constituency voting means different things in different parts of the world. England, for example, has a scheme under which all Scotsmen have heavier weight in the elections than do Englishmen. For a long time Northern Ireland had its own autonomous government and, as a sort of payment for that, had a lower weight in Parliament than its population would normally have given it. This is by no means all the peculiarities for England. For a long time there were representatives from various colleges sitting in the House of Commons. This was abolished at the end of World War II, but as far as I know, no one has looked into the question of whether these representatives had a favorable or unfavorable effect on the outcome.

This is merely a start. There is a radical difference in the population needed to elect a senator in Nevada and California. Does this have major effects on the outcome of the bills respecting those two state? As far as I know, there are no actually careful studies of this issue.

Another extremely interesting case would be Greece and France. The reason Greece and France are interesting is because the governments of these two countries frequently change their election methods before an election, with the idea of scuppering the opposition. Since they are not very skillful, they have



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so far not been very successful in this objective, but they still, one would think, provide a great deal of data for comparative analysis. So far as I know no one has studied these cases.

To return to the chambers of the legislature, most democracies have more than one. Nebraska is almost unique in its unicameral, single-member legislature, although it shares that with Israel. I think many places, however, have two chambers, one of which is markedly weaker than the other. Is this better or worse than having two chambers which are of equal power or even a single chamber or for that matter three? In a way, giving the President the veto power means that our legislature has something equivalent to a three-chamber legislature.

In Iran, Khomeini introduced an interesting system in which there is a supreme court (the Council of Guardians), which depends upon a much more ancient constitution than our supreme courts, specifically the Koran and the Hadith. Does this make a difference? I should pause here to say that on the whole the government of Iran since 1900 has had strong elected elements. It has rarely been what we would call a perfect democracy, but it nevertheless has had a good deal of democratic influence, as it does today.

There is a strong tendency among Americans to assume that any country with which we have had very bad relations is probably a dictatorship. This, for example, leads people to allege that Germany was a dictatorship in 1914 and Japan in 1940. Khomeini was undoubtedly a nasty man, so the allegation he was a dictator is almost automatic.

This rule of antagonism works the other way. Our southern neighbor, Mexi- co, roughly from the 1930s when the parties of the left came into complete control until the present, is an odd rotating dictatorship in which the president is in very nearly complete control but is required to retire after 6 years. In com- pensation he is permitted to appoint his successor. I expect most of my readers do not know these facts because we rather like the leftist government of our next door neighbor and hence assume that it is democratic.

These are all subjects which I think would merit investigation, but I should repeat that a comparison of dictatorial and democratic governments is important. Some of South America has had a very long tradition of alternating democratic and dictatorial governments. Whether this tradition is going to be revived, I do not know. At the moment they have only three genuine dictatorships, Cuba, Peru and Mexico, and the present dictator of Mexico, Mr. Sali- nas, is showing signs of attempting to switch to democratic techniques.

Regardless of the future, the past should provide a strong study area in which to compare democracies to dictators. Was there a great change in policy when dictatorships are replaced by democracies and vice-versa. Paldam has inves- tigated this with respect to their monetary and deficit problems, but this is a very narrow investigation.



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Another problem is who should vote? At the moment, most democratic countries have adult suffrage although usually there are some classes - felons - that are not permitted to vote. Universal adult suffrage, however, is a rela- tively new idea, and as far as I know, there were no cases of it before World War I. England did not even have universal male suffrage during World War I, and only adopted it shortly after the end of the war. Before that time you had to have a certain, admittedly quite low, amount of money to vote if you lived in the countryside. It did not achieve universal adult suffrage until the 1930s.

Does any of this make any difference? By looking at the comparative votes in different states in the United States as the states gradually permitted women to vote, we could find out if there were changes in their legislation. I am sure we can expect them for those bills that reflect women only - such as rights of marriage partners. But I am not sure that anything else would show up as different. International comparisons would also be very helpful here.

Making international comparisons and considering England, you must remember they have a two-house legislature, the upper house of which is in- herited and appointed. Now it is true that the upper house has steadily had its power reduced since about 1904, and there are now a number of members of it who are not hereditary peers. Does this make any great difference? Does the bizarre appointed upper house of Canada make any great difference in out- comes there?

The last constitutional crisis in Australia came when the upper house refused to pass the budget and the governor-general took this as a reason for dissolving parliament. The fact that this led to a crisis is fairly good evidence that the upper house was not thought to have very much power. Does this make any difference? Once again, we should try to find out. An examination of whether their constitutional structure makes any difference should begin by careful comparative analysis of existing constitutions.

I have made a good many theoretical statements about different constitutional structures, but I would like to have the empirical data available to test them. Except for a long series of studies on American states by Tollison and his co-authors, this is largely lacking. Unfortunately, Tollison et al. were forced by data limitations to deal with mainly minor rather than major problems.

That these constitutional measures are believed to be important can be seen from the fact that there are lengthy debates about them. At the moment the Israelis think that their extreme proportional representation rule is not working well, and are talking about moving toward the English system, a system which they apparently do not fully understand. At the same time, the English, feeling that their system is not working very well, are talking about moving toward a proportional representation system, once again without very much evidence



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that they fully understand it. In both cases there is a great deal of excitement about potential change. I mentioned above that the Greeks and the French tend to change the election rules almost every election in hopes of sustaining the cur- rently dominant party in power and normally fail. This indicates both bad mo- tives and ignorance.

But any discussion of such constitutional questions automatically raises another fundamental problem which involves the defense of the constitution. One can say the constitution prevents certain types of legislation or requires a two-house legislature or something of that sort, but what prevents the constitution itself from changing either violently and quickly or slowly and gradually? What we need is a self-enforcing constitution, and as far as I know, there is no real theory of how we can design such a thing.

When I was a boy, I would have said it was very simple - the Supreme Court upheld the Constitution against the executive branch and the Congress. Today, of course, I know better. Since the 1930s, the court has been probably the major source of changes in the Constitution - certainly far more important than Congress and the executive branch.

Further, looking back at the past, it is obvious that this always was, to some extent, true. It might not have been so that the court was the major source of such changes, but it was always a source. The famous constitutional cases that you read in courses in constitutional law in law schools are almost exclusively cases in which the Supreme Court laid down a rule that was not in the Constitu- tion. In many cases the rule seems to be rather inconsistent with the rest of the Constitution although, of course, in other cases it simply extends them.

To repeat what I said above, we have no theory or practical rule for a self- enforcing constitution. How can a constitution be designed so that it defends itself? This is in many ways the most important question which public choice faces, and certainly a very important question for applied politics in general and unfortunately, we have no answer.

I was asked to predict the next 25 years in public choice, I have not predicted; I have expressed hopes. If I am lucky, my hopes will be accepted as research plans by various scholars with the result that, in fact, they will become successful predictions.



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