Michael C Munger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1087650 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael C Munger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael C |
| FAMILY NAME | Munger |
| SIGNATURE | MUNGER M C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2160-487X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 105 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 820 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 105 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Are there normative social epistemologies? Vernon Smith, Adam Smith, and the challenge of systems
Christopher Kam and Adlai Newson, The Economic Origins of Political Parties
One of my grad school professors, Kenneth Shepsle, was always miffed at the way that Public Choice scholars would hijack the notion of rationality, and call it “economics”. He would stand in his office doorway, smoking his pipe (yes, this was a long time ago), and loudly announce, “You know, you economists have no authorized monopoly on the idea that rational agents optimize! In fact, optimization in political science is older than your sad littl…
Contractarianism, constitutionalism, and the status quo
Race, risk, and greed: Harold Black's contributions to the institutional economics of finance
It Takes a Model to Beat a Model
Generating verisimilous and policy-relevant models of the macroeconomy in a democracy is a challenge. Three broad theoretical perspectives are considered: (A) the orthodox Keynesian Synthesis; (B) the Austrian response; and (C) the Public Choice response. The orthodox view is inaccurate, but has the advantage of being "a model." The Austrian critique, while largely correct, generates no usable political advice. The Public Choice critique provides…
Anthony Downs (1930–2021)
From Airbnb to solar: Electricity market platforms as local sharing economies
Attention distribution as a measure of issue salience
Randall G. Holcombe: Coordination, cooperation, and control: the evolution of economic and political power
Where you stand depends on where you live: County voting on the Texas secession referendum
Giants among us: Do we need a new antitrust paradigm
William R. Keech: In Memoriam
Breaking up is hard to do: Lessons from the strange case of New Zealand
Objective To investigate historical antecedents for the likely effects of Brexit, the “breaking up” of the Commonwealth is considered. In particular, the effects on New Zealand in the period following “Brentry,” or the entry of the UK into the EU, are measured and used to forecast the pattern of impacts the UK may encounter. Methods The technique of Synthetic Control. This quasi‐experimental method takes conscious advantage of features of endogen…
Condorcet Loser in 2016: Apparently Trump; Condorcet Winner: Not Clinton
Using thermometer score data from the ANES, we show that while there may have been no clear-cut Condorcet winner among the 2016 US presidential candidates, there appears to have been a Condorcet loser: Donald Trump. Thus the surprise is that the electorate preferred not only Hillary Clinton, but also the two “minor” candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, to Trump. Another surprise is that Johnson may have been the Condorcet winner. A minimal no…
Ideology and the Direction of Causation in the Acquisition and Maintenance of Shared Belief Systems
Preferences and beliefs are more widely and systematically shared than might be predicted by a subjective, idiosyncratic view arising out of neoclassical economics. Two works were published twenty five years ago on just this question, contesting conceptions of belief acquisition: Denzau and North (1994) and Hinich and Munger (1994). Denzau and North argued that beliefs are simplified representations of reality that provide conventional means of i…
Moral community and moral order: Buchanan’s theory of obligation
A Theory of Just Market Exchange
Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy (an excerpt)
According to Michael Munger, there is some evidence of the Third Great Economic Revolution, which can be traced within two dimensions: the sharing economy and the brokerage economy. Although in many industries, these two dimensions are far from each other, in some spheres where they interact, their intersection results in extending the new economy. In his book, Prof. Munger describes the features of the sharing economy; entrepreneurship is orient…
Tullock and the welfare costs of corruption: There is a “political Coase Theorem”
Liberalism and the Welfare State: Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State ed. by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Dieter Plehwe
Book Review| October 01 2019 Liberalism and the Welfare State: Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State ed. by Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Tamotsu Nishizawa, and Dieter Plehwe Liberalism and the Welfare State: Economists and Arguments for the Welfare State. Edited by Backhouse, Roger E.; Bateman, Bradley W.; Nishizawa, Tamotsu; Plehwe, Dieter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxvi; 250 pp. $74.00. Michael Munger Michael …
Starting from Where We Are: The Importance of the Status Quo in James Buchanan
Years After the Nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy
The Ecosystems of Simple and Complex Societies: Social and Geographical Dynamics
We present a spatial agent-based model of the emergence and proliferation of premodern complex societies in an isolated region initially inhabited by simple societies. At the intrasocietal level, the model integrates scalar stress, social fission, sociocultural evolution, societal collapse, and Malthusian-Ricardian demographic dynamics. At the geographical level, the model includes warfare for territory and captives, territorial division due to s…
Objections to Euvoluntary Exchange Do Not Have “Standing”: Extending Markets Without Limits
Robert D. Tollison: A remembrance
Legislators and Interest Groups: How Unorganized Interests Get Represented
This paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model. In the model, three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes: organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth, voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes, and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection. A given legislator's supply price for poli…
The Determinants of Industry Political Activity, 1978-1986
While the allocation of interest group monies to specific politicians has been extensively studied, little is known about the factors that determine of the overall level of political activity across groups. We study total contributions by corporate political action committees at the industry level. We create a large data set on industry political activity, covering 124 industries across five election cycles from 1978 to 1986 and sketch out a simp…
Comparing Interest Group PAC Contributions to House and Senate Incumbents, 1980-1986
Most work on the allocation patterns of campaign contributions by interest groups focuses on the relative productivity of legislators' effort in serving each group. Short time-series and cross-sectional studies of PAC activity have been done for the House of Representatives and the Senate separately, but no study has used (1) longer time series data or (2) made explicit comparisons among interest group (corporations, unions, and trade association…
Economic Models of Interest Groups: An Introductory Survey
Classical pluralists, the authors of The Federalist Papers, and many modem scholars have emphasized the critical role of the interests in shaping policies. Still, in general, deductive theory has not provided the hypotheses and explanations offered by political science in studying interests. Economists studying interest groups have taken a more abstract, analytical approach, but this work is largely unknown in political science, perhaps because i…
Allocation of Desirable Committee Assignments: Extended Queues versus Committee Expansion
Some committee assignments are perceived as being more valuable than others, requiring some systematic rationing device. Two institutions have evolved to serve this function: queuing and committee expansion. In order to discover which assignments are perceived as most valuable, a measure based on pairwise comparisons of transfers is suggested, with higher ranks associated with longer queues for membership. This measure, called a net transfer domi…
The Downsian Model Predicts Divergence
The `Downsian' model is widely held to predict the convergence of parties to the median in two-party systems with unidimensional policy spaces. We show this is not true, if voters are uncertain. This paper gives an exposition of the two-party divergence results, including (1) if both candidates are free to move, but the incumbent has lower variance of policy action as perceived by voters, then there is no equilibrium, even if preferences are `sin…
A Spatial Theory of Ideology
In the spatial model of politics voters choose the candidates closest to them in weighted Euclidean distance, and candidates seek to compete by positioning and repositioning themselves in and n-dimensional policy space. This model has recently come under attack from a number of scholars who assert its depiction of politics is unrealistic. Still these critiques retain the character of the original model. We offer a more radical alternative: an exp…
Investigating the Incidence of Killer Amendments in Congress
While much empirical research has been devoted to the study of “killer amendments” in recent years, few studies have explicitly examined the theoretical foundations of the phenomenon. The goal of this paper is to investigate why some killer amendment attempts are successful, when theory suggests that they should always fail. More specifically, we examine the practical political constraints on legislators’ abilities to neutralize the imminent thre…
Shirking, representation, and Congressional behavior: Voting on the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act
The elements of candidate reputation: The effect of record and credibility on optimal spatial location
Allocation patterns of PAC monies: The U.S. Senate
The (Un)predictability of Primaries with Many Candidates: Simulation Evidence
Sophisticated and myopic? Citizen preferences for Electoral College reform
Tullock and the welfare costs of corruption: There is a “political Coase Theorem”
The prohibition-repeal amendments: A natural experiment in interest group influence
On the political participation of the firm in the electoral process: An update
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Examines the role that institutions, defined as the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction, play in economic performance and how those institutions change and how a model of dynamic institutions explains the differential performance of economies through time. Institutions are separate from organizations, which are assemblages of people directed to strategically operating within institutional constraints. Institutions affect the …
Preference modification vs. incentive manipulation as tools of terrorist recruitment: The role of culture
Voter Uncertainty Can Produce Preferences with More Than One Peak, but Not Preference Cycles: A Clue to the Fate of Ross Perot
The one-dimensional Downsian spatial model entails single-peaked preferences for each voter. Consequently, the preference ranking of the electorate as a whole is also single-peaked, and Condorcet cycles in the preferences of the electorate are not possible. Our main theoretical results herein are that, if the model is generalized to allow for voter uncertainty about candidates' positions, then single-peakedness no longer exists invariably, either…
Five Questions: An Integrated Research Agenda for Public Choice
A comparison of incumbent security in the House and Senate
Doing Well While Intending Good: Cases in Political Exploitation
Exploitation has a deservedly bad reputation as an analytic concept in the social sciences. But this need not be so; a simple definition of exploitation is advanced that has a positive basis. Exploitation should be defined as the result of rent-seeking activity that results in social outcomes that are not Paretooptimal. Government, or the organization with a constitutional monopoly on the legitimate use of force, is ideally charged with balancing…
Condorcet Loser in 2016: Apparently Trump; Condorcet Winner: Not Clinton
Using thermometer score data from the ANES, we show that while there may have been no clear-cut Condorcet winner among the 2016 US presidential candidates, there appears to have been a Condorcet loser: Donald Trump. Thus the surprise is that the electorate preferred not only Hillary Clinton, but also the two “minor” candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, to Trump. Another surprise is that Johnson may have been the Condorcet winner. A minimal no…
The anatomy of government failure
Self-Interest and Public Interest: The Motivations of Political Actors
Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics showed that the public, politicians, and bureaucrats are often public spirited. But this does not invalidate public-choice theory. Public-choice theory is an ideal type, not a claim that self-interest explains all political behavior. Instead, public-choice theory is useful in creating rules and institutions that guard against the worst case, which would be universal self-interestedness in poli…
On the mutuality of interest between bureaus and high demand review committees: The case of joint production
International Relations and Politics
Legislators and Interest Groups: How Unorganized Interests Get Represented
This paper derives a supply price for public policy using a constrained maximization model. In the model, three sets of agents each have preferences over outcomes: organized interest groups offer campaign contributions to improve their own wealth, voters offer votes to obtain outcomes closer to their most preferred outcomes, and legislators seek both campaign contributions and votes to obtain reelection. A given legislator's supply price for poli…
Economics
On the political participation of the firm in the electoral process: An update
Allocation of Desirable Committee Assignments: Extended Queues versus Committee Expansion
Some committee assignments are perceived as being more valuable than others, requiring some systematic rationing device. Two institutions have evolved to serve this function: queuing and committee expansion. In order to discover which assignments are perceived as most valuable, a measure based on pairwise comparisons of transfers is suggested, with higher ranks associated with longer queues for membership. This measure, called a net transfer domi…
The Rationality of Ideology
Closeness, Expenditures, and Turnout in the 1982 U.S. House Elections
Students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout. This may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters, but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation. Another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization. We explore the latter possibility by using FEC and state data on campaign expenditures…
Declining electoral competitiveness in the House of Representatives: The differential impact of improved transportation technology
Public Choice in Political Science: We Don't Teach It, But We Publish It
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Comparative Political Finance in the 1980s
Shirking, representation, and Congressional behavior: Voting on the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act
Allocation patterns of PAC monies: The U.S. Senate
Committee Assignments, Constituent Preferences, and Campaign Contributions
We model the behavior of a vote‐maximizing legislator in order to predict interest group campaign contributions to incumbent politicians. We show that committee assignments and voter preferences affect the price a legislator requires to produce policies for any interest group. An econometric analysis of actual interest group contributions shows that these groups make significantly larger contributions to legislators on committees with jurisdictio…
Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Examines the role that institutions, defined as the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction, play in economic performance and how those institutions change and how a model of dynamic institutions explains the differential performance of economies through time. Institutions are separate from organizations, which are assemblages of people directed to strategically operating within institutional constraints. Institutions affect the …
Guessing and Choosing: A Multicriterion Decision on Disposal Technology for Low-Level Radioactive Waste
Public officials faced with difficult and technologically complex decisions often resort to decision rules that purport to aggregate disparate judgements. Such multicriterion decisions are only as good as the procedures used to perform such aggregation, however. We examine the use of one such decision-making tool, a variant of the Delphi technique, in the choice of a disposal technology for low-level radioactive waste for the Southeast Compact Co…
Economics
Economic Models of Interest Groups: An Introductory Survey
Classical pluralists, the authors of The Federalist Papers, and many modem scholars have emphasized the critical role of the interests in shaping policies. Still, in general, deductive theory has not provided the hypotheses and explanations offered by political science in studying interests. Economists studying interest groups have taken a more abstract, analytical approach, but this work is largely unknown in political science, perhaps because i…
Perspectives on Positive Political Economy
A Spatial Theory of Ideology
In the spatial model of politics voters choose the candidates closest to them in weighted Euclidean distance, and candidates seek to compete by positioning and repositioning themselves in and n-dimensional policy space. This model has recently come under attack from a number of scholars who assert its depiction of politics is unrealistic. Still these critiques retain the character of the original model. We offer a more radical alternative: an exp…
The elements of candidate reputation: The effect of record and credibility on optimal spatial location
Comparing Interest Group PAC Contributions to House and Senate Incumbents, 1980-1986
Most work on the allocation patterns of campaign contributions by interest groups focuses on the relative productivity of legislators' effort in serving each group. Short time-series and cross-sectional studies of PAC activity have been done for the House of Representatives and the Senate separately, but no study has used (1) longer time series data or (2) made explicit comparisons among interest group (corporations, unions, and trade association…
Doing Well While Intending Good: Cases in Political Exploitation
Exploitation has a deservedly bad reputation as an analytic concept in the social sciences. But this need not be so; a simple definition of exploitation is advanced that has a positive basis. Exploitation should be defined as the result of rent-seeking activity that results in social outcomes that are not Paretooptimal. Government, or the organization with a constitutional monopoly on the legitimate use of force, is ideally charged with balancing…
Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice
There is no unified theory that can explain both voter choice and where choices come from. Hinich and Munger fill that gap with their model of political communication based on ideology. Rather than beginning with voters and diffuse, atomistic preferences, Hinich and Munger explore why large groups of voters share preference profiles, why they consider themselves "liberals" or "conservatives." The reasons, they argue, lie in the twin problems of c…
Not Equitable, Not Efficient: U.S. Policy on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal
Elected officials and policy analysts alike often treat equity and efficiency as distinct concerns. In this case study, focusing on U.S. policy for disposing of low-level radioactive waste, we consider an instance where the distinction between equity and efficiency is difficult to sustain. The “equity, then efficiency” approach embodied in the compact system of regional agreements is largely to blame for the current crisis facing generators, regu…
Political science (90 works) · Economics (82 works) · Law (81 works) · Politics (62 works) · Law (58 works) · Public finance (42 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (33 works) · Law and economics (30 works) · Computer Science (29 works)