ABSTRACT
In what follows, I adopt a particular model of government, a specific concept of efficiency and a distinct approach to democracy. I make that choice because the selected building blocks can, without too much difficulty, be assembled to yield a theory which can shed new light on politics and, particularly, on the public finances of real-world governments. This means that what follows is intended to be primarily positive or descriptive, even though I have, twice already, made use of the essentially normative concept of efficiency. It will be easier to explain the use I make of that concept after the discussion of some of the different versions of it which one finds in the literature. At this point, let me simply note that I follow standard practice: I seek to demonstrate that certain mechanisms satisfactorily account for what we observe in the real world and, on the basis of results derived from a given theory of how these mechanisms blend to produce efficiency, conclude that the outcome is or is not efficient. I return to this question at the end of the second section.
