The Competitive State

Abstract

This dissertation studies competitive political institutions and institutional incentives in the context of legislative and executive politics, and asks to what extent they encourage representatives and ruling parties to always work toward advancing all their people’s welfare as best they can. Part I of the dissertation proposes a general theoretical framework for the study of competitive political institutions and processes, and argues that this framework avoids various conceptual errors in the scholarly literature – namely (i) the conflation of competitive and non- competitive political relations; (ii) the claim that political competition is analogous with market competition; (iii) the claim that competition in general produces desirable social consequences; and (iv) the claim that competition is in general normatively praiseworthy. Next, Part II applies this general framework to investigate competitive politics in modern representative democracies and democratic federations in three major contexts: (i) electoral competition; (ii) interstate competition; and (iii) competition between state and federal governments. All three forms of political competition are concluded to be significantly misaligned with the aim of encouraging representatives and ruling parties to always work toward advancing all their people’s welfare as best they can. Part III of the dissertation then considers competitive politics as it might be made to be. It proposes a schematic for a new competitive political system – population-maximizing competitive federalism – and argues that it should, in expectation, fare better. The dissertation concludes with a brief evaluation of population-maximizing competitive federalism along some additional normative dimensions, including contractarianism, liberalism, and political equality. Here, too, there are good reasons to favor the new political system.