Gordon Tullock's contributions to the theory of constitutions

For academic year 1958-59, Gordon Tullock was awarded the first research fellowship at the newly established Thomas Jefferson Center (TJC) for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia.  It was during his time at the TJC that Tullock formed a lasting bond with James M. Buchanan, their collaboration beginning with The Calculus of Consent (1962) and leading to a number of joint research projects and papers over the next 55 years.  During his fellowship Tullock completed and submitted for publication an analysis of logrolling in a democratic government. It was published in December 1959 and according to the preface to The Calculus referred to Tullock’s paper on logrolling as “the first organic part of the final product.”  This work became Chapter 10 of The Calculus and building upon this insight in the summer of 1959, Tullock prepared and circulated a mimeographed research paper entitled, “A Preliminary Investigation of the Theory of Constitutions" containing the first elements of the important central analysis now covered in Chapter 6.

Our paper examines the origins of Tullock’s contribution to the study of constitutions.  Tullock’s spur for research on constitutions was his intuition on the relationship between economic growth and institutions that serve as constraints on government.  Tullock argued that economists used the wrong theory of growth – the relevant measure was the rate of growth of government intervention.

The basic points of Tullock’s analysis of constitutions include:

• Constitutions are essential to controlling the role, scope, and grasp of government;
• Constitutions are the means to prevent government from becoming a mechanism for people with political power to transfer funds to themselves in democratic institutions.  [This was an early recognition of the phenomenon which because the formal concept of “rent seeking”];
• Tullock was critical of economist’s efforts to assess the rate of growth of government intervention against the economic growth rate;
• Tullock argued that economists should focus on the rate of change of institutions against the economic growth rate;
• A negative correlation exists between the rate at which government grows and the rate at which the economy grows;
• Constitutions serve a critical role in limiting the growth of government.