Competition and Structure The Political Economy of Collective Decisions: Essays in Honor of Albert Breton

The essays in this volume, written by well-known economists and other social scientists from North America, Europe, and, in one case, Australia, share to an unusual degree a common concern with the competitive mechanisms that underlie collective decisions and with the way they are embedded in institutional settings. This gives the book a unitary inspiration whose value is clear from the new understanding and insights its chapters provide on important theoretical and practical issues such as the social dimension and impact of trust, the management of information in bureaucratic settings, the role of political parties in constitutional evolution, inter-level rivalry and reassignments of powers in federal and unitary systems of government, the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on federal institutions or arrangements, and the response of governments and overarching institutions of globalization