ECONOMY

992 politics and scientific enquiry
and especially if majority voting is operative, there may exist generalized consensus
at the constitutional level. The rules in prospect or in being may secure widespread
adherence and acceptance if, over an anticipated whole sequence of particular actions,
all members of the polity expect to secure positive benefits.
For scientific analysis, the focus shifts from questions concerning the desirability of
this or that particular policy proposal, as it moves through the complex institutional
structure through which political outcomes finally emerge, to questions concerning
the efficacy of the structure, as described by the rules of the political game, by the
constitution. Constitutional political economy emerges as a research program on its
own.
This program involves analyses of processes through which constraints are selected,
as opposed to analyses of processes through which choices are made among
exogenously determined and imposed constraints. Such research becomes relatively
unfamiliar territory, especially to economists. The enterprise does require acceptance
of the presumption that the basic structures of rules, the inclusive constitution of
a society, are subject to deliberatively designed and implemented change. These
structures become variables, and the working properties of alternative sets of rules
become direct objects of enquiry. Also, as a normatively meaningful program, constitutional
political economy does rest on the proposition that constitutions, as such,
can constrain the excesses of politics.
Practical examples of the relevance of this research program emerged in the discussions
concerning the prospects for selecting a constitution for the European Union
in the early years of the new century, and in the efforts to design constitutions for
the republics that were components of the Soviet Union. Questions as to the relative
efficacy of parliamentary and republican systems of governance, of unicameral and
bicameral legislatures, of plurality and proportional representation, of federal and
unified structures, remain active objects of enquiry, along with many other less
inclusive ones.
12 Politics as Exchange
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In Section 1, I stated that enquiry into politics over the half-century incorporates
the economists’ approach to social interaction, and specifically in the concentration
on the behavior of individual actors in political processes—actors who are modeled
as furthering identifiable interests in accordance with precepts of rationality. Almost
exclusive emphasis has been on the development of a micro- rather than on a macropolitics.
A “positive” science of politics need go no further; the objective may be limited
to the politics that is observed, whether this be described by the behavior of the
autocratic ruler, the participant in large-number electoral settings, the bureaucratic
rent-seeker, the party chairman, the representative agent in any of several roles, or any
other of the many public choice situations that require individual action.