Skip to content
LeadAfrik
Intermediate · Self-paced2026 Edition

Public Choice & Collective Decisions

Politics without romance — the economic analysis of voting, bureaucracy, and interest groups. The Virginia school applied to how budgets, regulations, and deficits actually get made.

8

Modules

~6h 20m

Reading time

Intermediate

Level

Self-paced

Format

§

Syllabus

  1. 01

    Public choice — politics without romance

    Buchanan and Tullock: methodological individualism applied to government, and what changes when you drop the benevolent-planner assumption.

    ~40 minModule 01
    →
  2. 02

    Voting rules and their paradoxes

    Majority rule, Condorcet cycles, Arrow's impossibility theorem, and the median-voter theorem — with the assumptions that make it fail.

    ~55 minModule 02
    →
  3. 03

    The calculus of consent

    Constitutional vs in-period choice, the trade-off between decision costs and external costs, and why unanimity is neither possible nor desirable.

    ~45 minModule 03
    →
  4. 04

    Bureaucracy and the budget-maximising agency

    Niskanen's model, the principal-agent problem in the public sector, and the discretion that turns mandates into empires.

    ~50 minModule 04
    →
  5. 05

    Logrolling, vote-trading, and pork

    How bundling and vote-trading over-graze the fiscal commons, and why the appropriations process produces projects no majority wanted alone.

    ~45 minModule 05
    →
  6. 06

    Interest groups and regulatory capture

    Stigler-Peltzman's theory of regulation, the demand and supply of rules, and the revolving door between regulator and regulated.

    ~50 minModule 06
    →
  7. 07

    Fiscal illusion and the deficit bias

    Why voters under-perceive the cost of spending, the common-pool problem behind deficits, and the structural tilt toward debt.

    ~45 minModule 07
    →
  8. 08

    Constitutional political economy and fiscal rules

    Debt brakes, balanced-budget rules, independent fiscal councils, and the PFM-Act ceilings meant to bind a future government.

    ~50 minModule 08
    →

How to use this course

Start with module 01 if the material is new; skip ahead if you have prior exposure. Each module is self-contained but the arc is sequential — the projects in the final module assume the toolkit from modules 1-11. Every module ends with key takeaways and a curated further-reading list with primary sources.