Since its publication in 1962, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s foundational work of public choice and constitutional economics has accumulated roughly 12,500 citations on Google Scholar. The book’s insights about the study of democratic political processes are invaluable for analyzing a wide variety of rule-changing proposals, such as abolishing the Electoral College voting for U.S. president candidates or adopting state-level changes in the method of allocating such votes.

William F. Shughart II is a Distinguished Research Advisor at the Independent Institute and the J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University.
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Arthur R. Wardle is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Government and PoliticsLaw and LibertyPolitical HistoryPolitical Theory
Other Independent Review articles by William F. Shughart II
Spring 2023 FDR’s Gambit: The Court Packing Fight and the Rise of Legal Liberalism
Winter 2022/23 The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the Administrative State
Fall 2018 Gordon Tullock’s Critique of the Common Law
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