Abstract

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent and Vincent Ostrom in The Political Theory of a Compound Republic brought the study of constitutional choice into public choice theory and provided the basis for constitutional economics. Buchanan and Tullock presented a typical economist’s model of the trade-off between decision-making and political externality costs, and Ostrom, in his reconstruction of the political theory underlying the Constitution of the United States as explicated in The Federalist, expanded the model to introduce information and learning. Ostrom also expands on ideas contained in The Calculus and The Federalist to develop the concept of polycentric federalism whereby one can examine all governments, including state and local, within the same framework. The chapter concludes with an examination of some of the applications of the approach to national, state and local governments.