Collective choice i

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Recitations: 1 session / week, 1 hour / session

This is an applied theory course covering topics in the political economy of democratic countries. This course examines political institutions from a rational choice perspective. The now burgeoning rational choice literature on legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and elections constitutes the chief focus. Some focus will be placed on institutions from a comparative and/or international perspective.

The class grade will be calculated as follows:

Problem sets are mostly taken from Persson, Torsten, and Guido Tabellini. Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780262661317, with the due dates indicated in the calendar below. The topic reviews consist of the following: selecting three articles on a particular topic in political economy (which could be any non-starred paper in the reading list, or any group of papers outside the reading list), explaining the main contributions of each article, and assessing what is learned about the topic from the articles and what questions remain unresolved. Each review should be no longer than 6 pages.

Problem set 3 due

First topic review due

Problem set 5 due

Second topic review due

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