The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy
By Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan
Publisher
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- Foreword
- Ch. 1, The Constitutional Imperative
- Ch. 2, The Contractarian Vision
- Ch. 3, The Myth of Benevolence
- Ch. 4, Modeling the Individual for Constitutional Analysis
- Ch. 5, Time, Temptation, and the Constrained Future
- Ch. 6, Politics Without Rules, I
- Ch. 7, Rules and Justice
- Ch. 8, Politics Without Rules, II
- Ch. 9, Is Constitutional Revolution Possible in Democracy
Time, Temptation, and the Constrained Future
***
Preface
Preceding chapters have offered a philosophical-methodological perspective from which an emphasis on the rules or institutions within which social interaction takes place more or less naturally emerges. In this chapter, we offer
reasons for rules in a more specific sense. Any binding rule is, of course, a constraint on behavior. Hence the question, Why should a person, or persons, deliberately choose to impose constraints on his or their own freedom of action?
There are several answers to this question, the applicability of each depending on the choice setting with which one is dealing. Our initial emphasis in this chapter is on the
temporal dimensionality of individual choice, on the effects that recognition of this dimensionality exerts on choice behavior itself, and notably on the choice of rules. That is to say, we examine the implications of the simple fact that people choose among alternatives in the knowledge that their choices will affect the options available to them in subsequent periods. These effects are important and worthy of analysis regardless of the choice setting. But as noted, and as the discussion will suggest, the effects differ among settings, notably between individual behavior in private- and collective-choice roles.
Recognition of the temporal dimensionality of choice provides one “reason for rules”—rules that will impose binding constraints on choice options after the rules themselves have been established. That is to say, in either a private-choice or a public-choice role, persons may choose to restrict their own futures, and such behavior may be wholly rational.
The chapter is divided into two parts: The first analyzes individual choice in a private setting; the second analyzes individual choice in a collective-decision setting.
Part 1. Individual Private Choice
I. Introduction
The commonplace warning that “we start from here” prefaces any serious discussion of institutional-constitutional change. In a casual treatment, the “here” is atemporal. Our emphasis is instead on the temporal element. Not only must we start from here, defined as where we are, but we must also start
now, in the present. We cannot undo events that have already taken place. We may, of course, reinterpret our history, but we cannot go back in time and reverse its course.
We can act only now; we cannot act in the past. But neither can we act in the future. We confront choice options now, not later, and although the action that we take now may influence the choice of options available to us later, along with our possible orderings of these options, the fact remains that we cannot, in the present, make choices in future time. Nonetheless, the choices that we make now must embody the recognition that we will also face choices at some later date.
II. The Ultimate
Z‘s
We shall relate the analysis here to modern developments in the theory of individual choice behavior, notably to the work of Gary Becker and his colleagues.
*32 In that work, the arguments in an individual’s utility function have been redefined so that they represent composite “commodities,” the
Z‘s, which are themselves produced by the household through combinations of inputs, the
X‘s, which are purchased as ordinary goods in the marketplace. Household production functions describe the relevant trade-offs among the separate inputs, the
X‘s, that are variously combined to generate the
Z‘s. The individual is modeled as maximizing utility, defined over the
Z‘s, given the market or shadow prices for the
X‘s, within some overall income constraint.
From this basic construction, it is relatively straightforward to shift one stage back in the individual’s decision process and to drop the income constraints by including leisure, or desired usage of time, as a
Z commodity with its own shadow price. We can then model the individual as choosing a whole profile of behavior, constrained by time, talent, and initial endowments. This one step back in the decision sequence would seem to be as far as most modern economists could go. They would not seek to go farther back in the imagined choice chain, to get behind the set of composite commodities, the Beckerian
Z‘s. Economists become uncomfortable when they are unable to specify arguments in utility functions.
Our interest here, however, is not in further elaboration of the analysis of utility maximization in the orthodox economists’ framework. Our interest lies, instead, in moving beyond the Beckerian
Z‘s to what we might call the “ultimate
Z‘s.” Our concern is with an individual’s selection of a life-style, or behavior pattern, in a more comprehensive setting than any that might be conceptualized as the maximization of a function defined over a set of known arguments. The individual may choose a life plan, a sequence of actions, that he hopes will ensure that his experiences are “interesting,” “good,” “rewarding,” and/or “happy.”
There must, of course, be minimal attainment of the Beckerian
Z‘s for the achievement of such experiences. The basic human needs—food, clothing, shelter, sex, security, liberty—will place bounds on feasible life-styles. But, essentially, individuals in modern Western society have long since attained levels of affluence that enable them to transcend these elementary biological determinants of behavior.
III. Preferences for Preferences
To what extent are the preferred trade-offs among the ultimate
Z‘s chosen? Can we really go much beyond the Beckerian
Z‘s? Can we say anything about the formation of preferences? Can we discuss meta-preferences meaningfully?
More can be said once we recognize that individuals make choices sequentially over discrete time periods and that choices made in one period influence those made in later periods. We stress here that we seek to do more than introduce the capital investment aspects of current-period choices. We can readily incorporate such aspects into the standard framework by defining a relevant
Z as “consumption in time
t
i,” hence allowing a person at time
t0 to devote available resources to the production of that
Z. This analysis implicitly presumes that the individual chooses only at
t0. No multiperiod choice is introduced, although the temporal interdependence of utility is embodied in the analysis.
We propose to examine genuine multiperiod choice in a setting where the individual, having chosen among the relevant
Z‘s, all dated as of time
t0, moves through time to find himself at
t1. He is not the same person who confronted choice at
t0, and this fact will be taken into account when the initial choice is made at
t0. At
t1, the individual will be a “product” of choices that have been previously made at
t0 and over the whole sequence of periods
t-1,
t-2, …,
t
-n. Within relevant limits, the individual constructs himself as an acting and choosing entity by the actions taken in periods before that in which choice is now confronted.
*33
The individual has a private, personal
history, and this history will have shaped both the preferences and the constraints that interact to determine choice behavior in any period
t0. A person who has never tasted wine cannot exhibit a preference for “good” wines even when the standard constraints allow such options to be within the potential consumption bundle. A person who has not trained for long-distance running cannot compete in the Boston marathon regardless of a strong desire to do so.
*34 In the conceptualization here, an individual is analogous to a specific capital good, a machine designed and constructed with a determinate form and shape and, therefore, capable of being used over a relatively limited range of functions, departures from which can be made only at some anticipated costs in efficiency.
Rationality precepts require that this temporal interdependence be recognized. A rational person, temporally located at
t0 and given a personal history, will recognize that current-period choices among relevant
Z‘s will, in turn, directly affect the range of
Z‘s that will be potentially attainable in
t1 and beyond and, also, that current-period choices can shape, to an extent, the
Z‘s that will be preferred in later periods. “The individual” at
t1 will be predicted to be some continuity of the person who faces the choice options at
t0; the individual “constructs” the chooser at
t1 and beyond, as well as the set of choice options, within limits. (The limits of the interdependencies are not important for the analysis as such.) A preference ordering of the set of possible “persons at
t1” that the chooser reckons to be feasibly attainable would seem no different, conceptually, from a preference ordering of a set of basic
Z commodities.
If such a preference ordering is admitted to be possible, and if current-period choices are acknowledged to affect the choices to be made in subsequent periods, the analysis must involve a “preference for preferences.” Some futures must be deemed better than others, and choices in the present will tend to reflect these preferences.
IV. Past, Present, and Future
Despite the anticipated continuity of being, the individual knows that the person who will confront the choices in
t1 will be different. This future reality must enter into the decision calculus of the present, in
t0, as a constraint. Within limits, the person who will exist in
t1 can be “constructed” so as to reflect the preference ordering exhibited at
t0—but only within limits. Such a construction will, at best, be only partial, and the chooser at
t0 will know that the person alive at
t1 must exhibit a will and a personality, a set of preferences, that are “all his own.” The new person, emergent only in
t1, may find it in his power to destroy or modify seriously any plans that may be carefully reflected in the forward-looking choices made at
t0. The person who chooses at
t0 operates in a tension that opposes the continuity of his temporal existence as a conscious being to the reckoned potential for temptation by the less reflective other selves that the future may bring forth.
As a continuing conscious being, the individual may be reluctant to impose constraints on his freedom of action. Liberty may be valued even if the person does not know what will be the object of his actions in future periods. At the same time, however, totally unconstrained behavior may be genuinely feared. A preferred life plan is vulnerable to depletion and erosion by patterns of behavior that the “other” persons in future periods may exhibit. From a planning perspective in
t0, therefore, the reference individual may seek out ways to make “subversive” actions costly to those “other persons” that may emerge from the same consciousness in future periods and, in extreme cases, may try to prohibit such behavior.
There are two distinct but related ways the individual might attempt to accomplish this purpose. The first involves the selection of a set of moral precepts that can guide both present- and future-period choices. To the extent that a person establishes a coherent and subjectively meaningful morality, and draws on intellectual and emotional resources in the legitimization and justification of this morality in a manner designed to leave quasi-permanent residues, he will succeed in increasing the costs of any future-period departures from the life plan partially described by adherence to the precepts of such morality. An internal personal commitment to live by a set of moral rules will not explicitly bind choices. But such a commitment can ensure that undesired patterns of behavior (as evaluated from the perspective of
t0) will give rise to feelings of guilt. Consider the work ethic as an example. If a person imbeds this ethic in his psyche, by either design or unconscious habituation, sloth in future periods will be accompanied by subjectively sensed costs. Loafing will seem sinful; it will cost more to loaf.
The person may seek, however, to go beyond an instrumental selection of current-period
Z‘s and also beyond the instrumental adoption of a personal moral code. The individual may, over certain ranges of potential choice behavior, attempt to
precommit future-period choice by the imposition of binding rules or constraints. That is to say, the person may deliberately reduce the choice options anticipated to be open in
t1 and beyond. There may be a conscious reduction in liberty or freedom of action. The purpose will be to close off possibilities for acting in ways that are deemed “inefficient” in carrying forward a preferred life plan.
As an example, consider Crusoe alone on his island (before Friday). He may deliberately choose to sleep on the beach at a location where the morning tide will rudely awaken him. By sleeping in such a place, Crusoe precommits himself to start the next day’s work early. He closes off the option of deciding when to get up because his life plan includes work rather than sloth, and he wants to remove temptation of the latter.
Precommitment has been discussed at some length by Jon Elster in his book
Ulysses and the Sirens.*35 As the classic example of the title suggests, Ulysses has himself bound to the mast of his ship as it approaches the sirens’ shore. He recognizes his weakness of will; he does not trust his ability to resist temptation, and he knows that if he succumbs, the larger purpose of the voyage will be undermined.
Precommitment has been analyzed by Thomas Schelling
*36 and others as a “strategy of conflict.” In potential gamelike interactions, precommitment may offer a means of securing strategic advantage. The general orders the bridge to be burned after his army has crossed the river. Such a strategic “reason of rules” is not the object of our attention in this chapter or, indeed, in this book. In the discussion here, only a single person is directly involved. There is no strategic interaction as such, except that between the person who is and the person who might be. As the analysis has suggested, constraints on future-period behavior may emerge from the rational calculus of a person who remains totally isolated from other persons. The individual may precommit himself to choices that are deemed more worthy in a long-range perspective than a pattern of purely situational responses.
The analysis is not, of course, restricted to the choice behavior of an individual in social isolation. Part 2 of this chapter extends the analysis to the behavior of the individual in choice settings that are explicitly collective. But even when choice remains strictly “individualistic,” the choice setting may be social, as exemplified in market relationships. In these situations, the nonstrategic setting remains descriptive so long as the choice of the individual is not predicted to influence the behavior of other persons directly. Persons who act as demanders and/or suppliers of resources, goods, and services in competitive markets may do so without being conscious that they are bargaining over terms of trade or, differently stated, over shares in the gains from trade. In more general terms, the analysis seems applicable to all large-number settings where the reference person remains one among many and where the behavior of others is taken as a part of the environment rather than as an object to be controlled.
Part 2. Individual Public Choice
I. Introduction
We have discussed the private-choice calculus of the individual in some detail because the analysis is helpful in introducing the more complex calculus of the individual confronting the public- or social-choice setting. In order to reduce the discussion to manageable proportions, we shall ignore several of the complexities that arise. We shall continue to neglect strategic behavior. The individual in a public-choice setting is one among many and can rationally treat the behavior of all others as if it were part of the environment and hence not subject to manipulation. We also continue to concentrate on the choice calculus of a single reference individual. We neglect problems involved in securing agreement among persons, although, as the argument will suggest, the operation of the rules for making arrangements may modify the individual’s choice behavior. We presume that the individual will behave in the many-person collective-choice setting as if he pursues his own interests as they are reflected in the underlying utility function.
One reason for the detailed elaboration of private-choice behavior in Part 1 was to suggest that in several respects, the private- and public-choice settings are similar. We can summarize the earlier analysis as follows: A person faces a choice at
t0, a choice that will be constrained by choices made in prior periods; this choice will be informed by the influence that behavior in
t0 is anticipated to exert on choices made in
t1 and beyond. The person in
t1 and beyond is, in part, constructed by choices made in
t0 and earlier, but at the same time the person in
t1 and beyond must be different from the one who must act in
t0. In this setting, the individual chooses among the
Z‘s in
t0; the individual may adopt moral rules; the individual may precommit future choices—all of these actions are designed to further the achievement of a preferred life plan.
II. Society with a History
Let us now consider the position of an individual who, at
t0, is one among many members of a given society, a community, that has its own history, as a political-collective entity, quite apart from the various collected histories of its individual members. That is to say, the collectivity, as an organized polity, has “acted” over a sequence of past periods. It has gone to war or it has maintained peace; it has imposed onerous taxes on its citizens or it has not; it has allowed citizens to enjoy liberty over wide ranges of possible action or it has not. The “it” that has “acted” to create such a history must, of course, have assumed the form of specific persons who have assumed, captured, or been placed in roles of agents. But these persons as agents will have acted in the name of the collective unit rather than explicitly as identifiable individuals.
The history of the collective unit, described by “choices” taken in all past periods, will constrain the set of available choice options in
t0, those that may be confronted both by the collectivity as such and by the individuals within that collectivity, in a manner fully analogous to the interdependencies discussed in the earlier analysis of private choice. The historically determined constraints may be descriptively summarized in the laws, institutions, customs, and traditions of the community, including the rules or institutions that define the means of making collective “choices.” Again, as in the earlier analysis, the “choices” made by the collective unit as such in
t0 will modify the options that will emerge in
t1 and beyond, through influences on the constraints or preferences or both.
Our concern in Part 2 is with the choice behavior of the person who participates in some group decision process as one member (one voter) among many and who expects that his expressed preferences (“choices”) will be counted and amalgamated with those of others through the operation of a known rule (for example, majority or plurality voting) that will generate a single decisive collective outcome that once reached, will be effective for all members, that is, will be “public” in the formal, analytic sense of this term.
III. Temporal Interdependence
Faced with a set of collective alternatives or options at
t0, the individual recognizes that both preferences and constraints embodied in the historical record are fixed. These are not within the set of choice variables under the control of the decision makers acting within the decision rules. Existing preference functions and the institutions generated by past choices are “relatively absolute absolutes,” subject to change, but only through time—change that might be influenced only marginally by choices made now. In reference to the individual’s
own evaluation of the choice options, there is no difference between private choice and public choice in this respect.
A major difference emerges, however, when the individual recognizes that, for public or collective choice, the possible changes in his own preferences may be irrelevant. Collective decisions are reached through the operation of some rule that combines individual expressions of preference. A preference ordering for the collectivity, treated as a unit, need not correspond to that of any individual in the group and, indeed, may not exist at all.
At this point, the analysis seems to lead naturally into a discussion of the most familiar theorem in social choice, Arrow’s impossibility theorem.
*37 This theorem shows that, even if individual preference orderings are themselves consistent and do not change through a series of pairwise comparisons between alternatives in the inclusive collective-choice set, the “preference ordering” exhibited by the collectivity, as a unit, may not reflect internal consistency under plausibly acceptable rules for combining individual choices.
The temporal dimension as such is not central to the analysis of the Arrow impossibility theorem, and the whole extended discussion of that theorem has been based on the implicit assumption that all of the pairwise comparisons are contemporaneous. By contrast, our emphasis here is strictly on the time dimension and on its implications for the individual’s choice calculus. We are not directly concerned with the possibility of inconsistency in contemporaneous collective “choice,” although this possibility might well offer an additional “reason for rules,” one that we essentially neglect in this book. We are concerned with the attenuation of individual control over collective-choice options and with the effects of such attenuation. A person may exhibit a clear preference between two political-choice options, and the array of separate preferences may be such that the existing decision rule generates a stable result in each discrete time period. Even if the person expects the preferences of others to remain unchanged over a sequence of periods, however, there is no means of predicting whether the sequence of outcomes generated by the decision rule will exhibit a time path that, to this person, seems consistent with his own ordering.
Superficially considered, this result seems to be merely a variant of the impossibility theorem. Note, however, that the problem isolated for examination here is
not located in the abrupt shiftability in the makeup of majority coalitions (in the absence of single-peakedness in preferences) as in the more familiar contemporaneous setting. The problem here finds its origins in the subjective nature of individual preferences themselves and in the inability of an individual to know
why other persons order alternatives as they do. An individual may prefer option or candidate A to option or candidate B in
t0 because it is anticipated that the selection of A in
t0 will allow, in time period
t1, a further selection of
a1, which is the ultimately desired objective. Alongside such a person who supports A in
t0, however, there may exist someone else in the decisive coalition who chooses this option for precisely the opposing reason, in order to select
a2 in
t1, a final outcome that the first person may find pessimal rather than optimal.
This fundamental difference between individual calculation in private and public choice has not, to our knowledge, been analyzed. The individual will tend to make voting choices in terms of a shorter time horizon than that reflected in his private choices. The person cannot, by the nature of the choice setting itself, incorporate the multiperiod interdependence of decisions to the same degree that is possible in private choice. Although a chooser may recognize, equally in the two settings, that selections made now will influence both preferences and constraints in future periods, the current-period utility value to the individual from “investment” in furthering the achievement of what the same person would prefer the collectivity to become must remain relatively lower than any comparable investment in becoming the private person projected in some idealized life plan. Put in different words, the individual in private choice may try to choose among current-period options so as to construct himself as a continuing consciousness in subsequent periods, as he seeks to achieve a coherent life. The same person, placed as one among many in a public-choosing role, must exhibit less interest in selecting current options with future periods in prospect.
IV. An Illustration
We shall illustrate the difference between private and public choice with a simple example. A person is in a collective-choice setting that presents two options in
t0, one of which will be chosen by the decision rule that combines individual expressions of preference between the two options. Each one of the options is expected to generate results that will be realized in
t1, at which time a second pairwise selection between two later options will be faced. The “choice” emergent from the decision rule in
t1 will, in turn, generate results that will be realized in
t2. We shall truncate the sequence arbitrarily at
t2 for the sake of simplicity.
![]() |
Figure 5.1 |
The individual evaluates the expected payoffs from the perspective at
t0. Figure 5.1 depicts the example in a tree diagram, with specific numerical values for expected payoffs, all of which are evaluated from
t0. The initial options are
A and
B; which of these will command the expression of preference by our reference person, whose payoffs are as depicted? The “choice” will depend on what the individual predicts the subsequent collective “choice” at
t1 will be. If the setting were purely private, with identical payoffs, the person would know that control over the options at
t1 would remain internal. Hence, a reasonably high probability would be placed on the choice of
a1 at
t1, so as to allow the ultimate achievement of the highest present-valued payoff of 1,000. Despite the recognition that the person at
t1 will be different from the chooser at
t0, the latter’s subjective sense of continuity will make such a probability assessment rational. If the setting were one of private choice, therefore,
A would be selected over
B in
t0.
The postulated setting is one in which the individual is one among many, however, and the decision is to be made for the collectivity as a unit, with the results applicable to all persons in the community. We are concerned with how the individual will express a preference between
A and
B in the voting booth at
t0.
Our reference person may well vote for
B rather than
A in
t0, reversing the revealed preference that might be exhibited in the private-choice setting. He may take this action because of his inability to place a high probability on the prospect that the collectivity, as a unit and via the operation of the existing decision rule, will, when faced with the options
a1 and
a2 at
t1, select the
a1 option, the result indicated to be the most desirable to the person in question. There is here no continuity of consciousness, no sense of quasi-permanent psychological unity. Even if the voter-chooser at
t0 reckons that there will be no change in individual preference orderings, either in his own or in those of others, between the two time periods, a lower probability must be placed on the prospect that the decision rule will generate the most desirable result in
t1. This lower probability stems from the fact that the individual has no way of knowing why others, who may be partners in the coalition that might express preferences for
A in
t0, order the options predicted to be faced at
t1. Persons in such a prospective coalition may well order the alternatives in Figure 5.1 in precisely opposed fashion to the person whose payoffs are depicted.
To make our example even more specific, consider a risk-neutral voter in the large-number setting who has no knowledge of the preferences of others. Under simple majority voting rules, this voter will assign a .5 prospect to each alternative at each stage in the pairwise choice sequence. In the numerical example of Figure 5.1, the individual will then vote for
B over
A, despite the fact that the present value of the sequence
Aa1 is higher than that of any other. If
B is chosen, the individual enjoys the payoff of 600 units at
t1. By contrast, if
A is selected by the decision rule, there is only a .5 prospect that
t1 having been reached, the rule will generate
a1 at the critical second node.
A more general way of stating the central proposition of the analysis is to say that the individual participant in collective choice will find it difficult to make
instrumental use of the collectivity in the furtherance of genuinely long-term objectives. “Investmentlike” collective alternatives will tend to be placed lower than “consumptionlike” alternatives in individual orderings. This basic reason for the limited time perspective exhibited in collective or public choice is quite different from other, more familiar reasons having to do with electoral term limits and the nonmarketability of individualized shares in “public good.”
V. Moral Rules and/or Constitutional Commitment
In Part 1 of this chapter we demonstrated that the individual who recognizes the temporal interdependence of choice may find it rational to adopt a set of moral rules even with reference to purely private behavior. It should be clear, however, that moral rules designed to constrain future-period behavior become enormously more important in the collective setting. The reference person knows that he is only one member of a group and that collective outcomes emerge from the operation of a specified decision structure. How can limits be placed on the “behavior” of the collectivity as a unit? How can the individual act in
t0 to ensure personal survival and security in the many-person world? He will seek to influence not primarily his own behavior in future periods but that of others who will be or will become members of the choosing group. With these considerations the individual may, on quite rational grounds, invest current-period resources in the indoctrination, dissemination, and transmission of a set of general principles or rules that will, generally, influence behavior toward patterns of situational response that are predictably bounded.
We also suggested in Part 1 that an awareness of the multiperiod interdependence of choice may sometimes provide a basis for precommitment, even in the most isolated private-choice setting. The individual may not trust himself as a rational chooser in any moment other than the reflective present. As we indicated, however, there are natural limits on precommitment in private choice, since the individual knows that his own freedom of action is to be constrained.
In a public-choice setting, no such natural limits apply, and the individual has immensely stronger grounds for choosing to impose constitutional precommitments on the behavior of collective entities. As noted earlier in Part 2, the individual at
t0 is less capable of predicting the collective response to the choice options predicted to be confronted in future periods than of predicting private, personal reactions. In the former, even if the individual predicts his own preferences accurately, there must remain uncertainty about the response patterns of others. As a general principle, rationality precepts should dictate an inverse relationship between the predictability of future-period “choices” and the desirability of constraining the set of future-period options.
*38
A second and related argument supports the relatively greater attractiveness of constraints on future-period choices in the collective setting. In strictly private choice, as noted earlier, the individual knows that any precommitment binds his ability to satisfy personal preferences, whatever these may be. There is a trade-off between precommitment and liberty. By contrast, in the public-choice setting, no such trade-off exists, at least in any direct sense. In voting for limits on future-period choice options open to the collectivity as a unit, the individual need not think in terms of restricting the set of personally preferred options at all. The boundaries imposed on the ranges of collective “choices” may be treated as being outside any set of potentially desired outcomes. Such boundaries may be considered applicable only to the potential collective outcomes that might be generated from the expressed preferences of persons other than the reference individual. Clearly, constitutional constraints on the collectivity’s power to act will tend to be treated quite differently than possible precommitments on private behavior.
*39
Let us return to the example depicted in Figure 5.1. The individual will tend to support a constitutional constraint that will increase the probability that the collectivity, when and if
t1 is reached, will generate the
a1 rather than the
a2 outcome. With such a constraint in place, the individual might select
A rather than
B in
t0, even in the public-choice setting. Consider, as a practical example, a collective choice between paying off and not paying off outstanding public debt. The individual may well express a preference for repayment, hence reducing future tax burdens associated with debt service,
if he can be assured constitutionally or otherwise that new debt will not be issued once the old debt is retired. Failing such assurance, the individual may express preference for continued rollover of the old debt.
Constitutional commitments or constraints become means by which members of a polity can incorporate long-term considerations into current-period decisions. In the absence of such constraints, individuals will be led, almost necessarily, to adopt a short-term perspective in politics. We shall discuss some of the practical implications of this short-term perspective in Chapter 6.
The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (University of Chicago Press, 1976).
What Should Economists Do? ed. James M. Buchanan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1979), pp. 93-112.
American Economic Review 67 (March 1977): 76-90.
Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).
Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: Wiley, 1951).