The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice: A Masterful Compendium (Book Review)

Abstract

This is a review article of The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, edited by Roger Congleton, Bernard Grofman, and Stefan Voigt. This two-volume collection has 90 chapters, with each chapter averaging 20.4 pages (excluding the volumes’ indexes). My subtitle conveys my judgment of this work. The articles are written for serious readers, and they give clear and concise statements of the material they cover. Someone who reads one of the articles will arrive in the vicinity of the frontier of the mainstream of public choice theorizing as this has developed since the middle of the 20th century. Despite my position from somewhere outside the public choice mainstream, I acknowledge readily and enthusiastically the ability of the essays in this Handbook to convey the contemporary state of public choice theorizing. The editors and authors deserve congratulations for their fine work.

Keywords: public choice; constitutional political economy; voting; elections; interest groups; rent seeking; political parties; dictatorship

JEL Classification: A12, A33, D70, H40, P50