Contracting government's contract rules

Author: Hu Shubao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: This book is an excellent academic monograph in China that applies the theory of public choice to analyze the design of democratic institutions. The author questions Buchanan's absolute majority decision rule and attempts to combine supermajority decision rules with the construction of a reasonable allocation of government power to enhance the representativeness of democracy. It is a good book that uses rational models to analyze the rules for achieving democratic values. The legitimacy of a democratic government comes from the will of the people, and thus how to effectively reflect this will has become the core of research in democratic theory and government theory. This book explores the principles of designing mechanisms to reflect public opinion, specifically focusing on the issue of contractual rules. The measurement of contractual rules primarily involves two standards: the degree of representativeness of government decisions (representativeness) and the cost of government operations. Buchanan established a function between these two standards, revealing the corresponding relationship between representativeness and cost. However, Buchanan's theory has two issues: 1) Buchanan uses cost rather than net benefits as the standard of measurement, making it unsuitable for most non-watchman-like countries; 2) Buchanan's research does not consider the impact of government organizational forms on contractual rules. Addressing these issues, this book proposes the idea of using net benefits as the standard to analyze majority rules, thereby introducing a new conceptual framework for contractual government decision-making models—combining decision rules with government models—and concluding that the combination of supermajority rules and consultative models is the paradigm of contractual rules. Additionally, the book briefly explores the relationship between informal contractual rules (culture) and formal contractual rules. Methodologically, this book employs mathematical analysis, and the integration of this method with political philosophy methods ensures that its conclusions are based on a more reliable and scientific foundation.