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1 Const. Pol. Econ. 1 (1990)

handle is hein.journals/constpe1 and id is 1 raw text is: CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, VOL. 1, NO. 1, 1990 THE DOMAIN OF CONSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS* James M. Buchanan** Constitutional political economy is a research program that directs inquiry to the working properties of rules, and institutions within which individuals interact, and the processes through which these rules and institutions are chosen or come into being. The emphasis on the choice of constraints distinguishes this research program from conventional eco- nomics, while the emphasis on cooperative rather than conflictual interaction distin- guishes the program from much of conventional political science. Methodological individ- ualism and rational choice may be identified as elements in the hard core of the research program. Introduction Richard B. McKenzie introduced the term constitutional economics to define the central subject matter of a Heritage Foundation conference that he organized in Washington, D.C., in 1982. In his fortuitous addi- tion of the adjective constitutional to the familiar disciplinary base, McKenzie provided precisely the combination of meaning that was needed to identify and to isolate a research program that had emerged as an integral, but distinguishable, part of the subdiscipline of public choice over the three decades of the latter's existence. The term Consti- tutional Politics calls attention to the relevant subject phenomena but fails to convey the relevance and applicability of economics, as a disci- plinary base, in the examination and evaluation of the foundational rules of social order. By borrowing McKenzie's term, I was then able to suggest, and later to write, an extended entry on constitutional economics for The New Palgrave (1987). With these beginnings, the ongoing research program (which is readily translatable into the more inclusive constitutional political economy) attained full semantic legiti- macy in the 1980's. The journal, Constitutional Political Economy becomes the institutionalized complement. This paper describes the domain of the still-emerging research pro- gram, the boundaries of which must be considered to be sufficiently *Paper prepared for Liberty Fund Symposium on German Ordnungstheorie and American Constitutional Economics Bonn, 3-6 June 1989. **Professor of Economics; Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason Univer- sity, Fairfax, Va. 22030. USA 1