Abstract
James Buchanan advocated the market mechanism for allocating resources because it is based on voluntary exchange. People engage in market transactions only when they believe they benefit from doing so. Buchanan depicted the political process the same way. People engage in collective activities to accomplish together ends that they would be unable to accomplish individually, or through bilateral exchange. Buchanan’s vision of politics as exchange is a normative framework for evaluating the rules within which political activity takes place. Rules that meet the criterion of agreement are desirable constitutional rules, and Buchanan recognized that not all government activity satisfies that criterion. Buchanan is the father of the subdiscipline of constitutional political economy, and his “politics as exchange” approach provides the foundation for much work in that area. Buchanan has created a foundation that is rich in ideas, but leaves behind a number of unanswered questions that point the way toward a further development of the research program in constitutional political economy.
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Notes
We note with some pride, as members of the Florida State University economics department, that Allen, Buchanan, and Colberg were all members of our department when they wrote that book.
This passage is related to Buchanan’s (1969) book on the subjective nature of cost. One can never know what the results might have been of an option that was foregone.
Buchanan (1990) depicts his constitutional political economy research program as analyzing the choice among constraints, contrasting it with models of individual behavior in which individuals make choices subject to constraints.
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Gwartney, J.D., Holcombe, R.G. Politics as exchange: the classical liberal economics and politics of James M. Buchanan. Const Polit Econ 25, 265–279 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9165-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9165-z
Keywords
- James Buchanan
- Constitutional economics
- Classical liberalism
- Economic freedom
- Politics as exchange
- Public choice
- JEL Classification
- H1
- H4