A Public Choice Analysis of James M. Buchanan’s Constitutional Project

Abstract

Public choice uses economic methods to analyze government decision-making. Buchanan’s constitutional project has the normative goal of discovering constitutional rules and institutions that empower government to protect individual rights, but that constrain government from violating people’s rights. He relies heavily on hypothetical models of unanimous agreement as a benchmark for evaluating constitutional rules, but with a limited analysis of the political processes that might secure a consensus. A promising avenue for advancing Buchanan’s constitutional project is to more explicitly apply public choice analysis to it—that is, to apply economic analysis to the actual political processes that produce constitutional rules.