George Tridimas | University of Ulster (original) (raw)
Papers by George Tridimas
Encyclopedia of Law and Economics
European Journal of Law and Economics
On 24 September 2019, in a unanimous judgment the UK Supreme Court ([2019] UKSC 41) ruled that th... more On 24 September 2019, in a unanimous judgment the UK Supreme Court ([2019] UKSC 41) ruled that the Prime Minister’s action to prorogue (suspend) Parliament for 5 weeks in the run-up to the 31-10-2019 deadline of the UK leaving the European Union, was unlawful and of no effect, as it prevented Parliament from carrying out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification. Although the Court did not pronounce on the merits and demerits of Brexit, its decision delighted “Remainers” but appalled “Leavers”. The Court ruling epitomises the potency of constitutional review by an independent judiciary. The paper applies collective choice theory to analyse the ruling of the Supreme Court. This is accomplished by (a) examining the legal basis of the Court ruling; (b) reviewing arguments for judicial review and (c) exploring the effect of the Court as an additional player in the game of collective choice in a spatial decision model.
Homo Oeconomicus
The substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the ... more The substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the quest for status featured prominently in ancient Greece. Paying for liturgies, the private finance of public expenditure by wealthy individuals, offered the opportunity to acquire status by choosing the level of contributions to outperform rival providers. Effectively, liturgies were a system of finance of public provision through redistributive taxation sidestepping state administration of taxes and expenditures. Applying the insights of the economic approach to status, the paper examines status competition in ancient Athens and compares paying for liturgies with a hypothetical system of explicit income taxation of the rich. It is concluded that status seeking increased aggregate provision of public goods. The results formalise important aspects of substantivism and illustrate the value of formal economic analysis in the investigation of the ancient Greek economy.
Journal of Institutional Economics
Along with introducing democracy, advancing philosophy and excelling at the arts, during the peri... more Along with introducing democracy, advancing philosophy and excelling at the arts, during the period 800–300 bce ancient Greece achieved substantial economic prosperity. Recent literature attributes the efflorescence to the institutions and culture of democratic city-states. However, the city-states failed to initiate sustained growth. Technological progress remained slow and the economic efflorescence ended after the prevalence of Macedon and the subsequent Roman conquest. The present study scrutinises the roles of city-state institutions and culture. It shows that ultimately ancient Greece could not sustain long-run growth because a multitude of independent small city-states prevented the exploitation of economies of scale and stoked continual wars that exhausted them financially and militarily, and because of a culture valuing landholding, self-sufficiency and collectivist attitudes.
Transitional Economies, 2001
European Journal of Political Economy, 2011
The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control t... more The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control the government and share power on the basis of an election outcome under proportional representation. As the outcomes of conflict and elections are uncertain, for each rational player the choice depends on which setting secures the highest expected net payoff. Adopting the methodology of the economics of conflict, I show that the factors of crucial importance are attitudes to risk, the comparative effectiveness of the adversaries in contesting election relative to a war, the size of the benefits from office, how the benefits are shared in a power-sharing agreement, and the proportion of the benefits destroyed by fighting.
Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, 2017
The paper uses political economy perspectives to explore the abolition of monarchy in modern Gree... more The paper uses political economy perspectives to explore the abolition of monarchy in modern Greece. First it presents the oscillating fortunes of the Greek monarchy in the period 1832 – 1974. Noting that strictly speaking none of the standard explanations of the overthrow of the monarchy, war defeat, dissolution of the state, decolonization and revolution, applies to modern Greece, it embarks on an examination of proximate and ultimate causes of the fall of monarchy. In this connection, it analyses the legitimacy of the Greek monarchy, the erosion of its institutional credibility as a result of failures of the crown to abide by the constitutional rules it had promised to respect, and its rejection by the voters in the 1974 referendum that cut across the standard division of Right and Left and was overseen by a conservative incumbent.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 1990.
Constitutional Political Economy, 2010
Drawing on the 1974 Greek parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum which abolished t... more Drawing on the 1974 Greek parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum which abolished the monarchy, the paper employs a spatial decision model to examine the strategic use of a parliamentary election and a non mandatory referendum by an agenda setter. The parliamentary election bundles two issues, the right to form a government and the right to choose the form of state.
Homo Oeconomicus
Among the several thought provoking arguments for reforming democracy, Bruno Frey advocates sorti... more Among the several thought provoking arguments for reforming democracy, Bruno Frey advocates sortition, that is, appointment to (some) public offices by lottery. Sortition was the hallmark of the direct democracy of ancient Athens. The paper assesses the Athenian practice of sortition by the criteria of representativeness, equity, partisanship, rent seeking, resource economy, and suitability of candidates for office. It concludes that, in view of fundamental conceptual differences between the Athenian democracy and the modern representative government, introduction of sortition into modern representative democracy poses extremely demanding challenges.
In 1832 Prince Otto Wittelsbach of Bavaria was appointed King of the newly founded independent Gr... more In 1832 Prince Otto Wittelsbach of Bavaria was appointed King of the newly founded independent Greek state. Otto's reign was a momentous period for Greece, initially under Regency then under Otto as an absolute ruler and from 1843 as a constitutional monarch until his expulsion in 1862. Using the historical record the paper focuses on three political economy questions, namely, the rationale for the foundation of a state, which relates to the provision of public goods and rent distribution, the constitutional order of the state regarding the choice between monarchy or republic, and the emergence of democracy by revolution or evolution.
The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical cha... more The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical challenges. Decisions were taken by majority vote in the Assembly. To keep politicians in line, the Athenians first used ostracism, which however was replaced by the graphe paranomon around 415 BCE. The latter provided that anybody who had made a proposal in the Assembly could be accused of having made an unconstitutional suggestion, bringing a potentially severe penalty if found guilty. We know of 35 such cases between 403 and 322. During the fourth century the notion of illegality was extended to a mere question of political undesirability. Henceforth any decision by the Assembly could be overturned by the courts, but if the accuser failed to get at least 20% of the jury votes, he was punished instead. While these rules can be seen as a safeguard against bad decisions, they also provided the Athenian politicians with important information about the relative strength of their political support. This effect has not been analysed before, and it may help explain the relative stability of political life in classical Athens. Furthermore this analysis also contributes to our understanding of a curious but often overlooked fact, namely that the decrees of the Athenian Assembly to a great extent concerned honorary rewards, and the use of the graphe paranomon in turn was largely focussed on the honorary decrees.
Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in ... more Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in the direct democracy of ancient Athens the assembly of the citizens met to decide policy up to forty times per year. The paper explores a model of constitutional choice where self-interested citizens decide how long to wait until they vote by maximising the net gain from an uncertain voting outcome. It is found that the frequency of voting increases unambiguously when the probability of being a member of the winning majority increases, and decreases with the loss from being a member of the losing minority and the resource cost of the vote. Under some plausible conditions, the frequency also rises with increases in the utility gain from the vote, the discount rate, and the required majority to pass a policy motion. It is argued that those conditions were met in Athens.
The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control t... more The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control the government and share power on the basis of an election outcome under proportional representation. As the outcomes of conflict and elections are uncertain, for each rational player the choice depends on which setting secures the highest expected net payoff. Adopting the methodology of the economics of conflict, I show that the factors of crucial importance are attitudes to risk, the comparative effectiveness of the adversaries in contesting election relative to a war, the size of the benefits from office, how the benefits are shared in a power-sharing agreement, and the proportion of the benefits destroyed by fighting.
The paper examines the choice of an incumbent government to call either a non-required referendum... more The paper examines the choice of an incumbent government to call either a non-required referendum or a parliamentary vote to ratify legislation, when there is uncertainty about the preferences of voters and elected representatives. Winning a referendum confers different gains from winning a parliamentary vote but requires different levels of effort to attract support. Differences in the preferences of the majority of voters and representatives, personal support for the incumbent and parliamentary party discipline emerge as determinants of the decision to call a non-required referendum.
In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility max... more In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility maximization to study voter demand for public expenditures. The model applies the median voter hypothesis to examine voter equilibrium when collective decisions concern the simultaneous determination of the tax rate to pay for the total size of public expenditures and the allocation of that total between exhaustive and transfer expenditures. Our findings suggest that the principal determinants of demand are relative prices, mean income, the trade-off between the disincentive effects of taxation and the benefits from public expenditures, and inequality in income distribution.
In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility max... more In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility maximization to study voter demand for public expenditures. The model applies the median voter hypothesis to examine voter equilibrium when collective decisions concern the simultaneous determination of the tax rate to pay for the total size of public expenditures and the allocation of that total between exhaustive and transfer expenditures. Our findings suggest that the principal determinants of demand are relative prices, mean income, the trade-off between the disincentive effects of taxation and the benefits from public expenditures, and inequality in income distribution.
Public Choice, 2016
Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years withou... more Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years without any additional financial sanction or other punishment, was an important and rather unique institutional aspect of the direct democracy. The present study explains the adoption of ostracism as the utility maximizing choice of a self–interested constitutional writer—cum—political actor to resolve violent political conflict and illustrates that it acted as a type of negative referendum on politicians. Using notions from game theory and spatial decision modeling, the paper goes on to attribute the infrequent use of ostracism to its two-stage decision making process wherein the decisive voter of the first stage differed from the decisive voter of the second stage.
Encyclopedia of Law and Economics
European Journal of Law and Economics
On 24 September 2019, in a unanimous judgment the UK Supreme Court ([2019] UKSC 41) ruled that th... more On 24 September 2019, in a unanimous judgment the UK Supreme Court ([2019] UKSC 41) ruled that the Prime Minister’s action to prorogue (suspend) Parliament for 5 weeks in the run-up to the 31-10-2019 deadline of the UK leaving the European Union, was unlawful and of no effect, as it prevented Parliament from carrying out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification. Although the Court did not pronounce on the merits and demerits of Brexit, its decision delighted “Remainers” but appalled “Leavers”. The Court ruling epitomises the potency of constitutional review by an independent judiciary. The paper applies collective choice theory to analyse the ruling of the Supreme Court. This is accomplished by (a) examining the legal basis of the Court ruling; (b) reviewing arguments for judicial review and (c) exploring the effect of the Court as an additional player in the game of collective choice in a spatial decision model.
Homo Oeconomicus
The substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the ... more The substantive view of the ancient economy argues that social considerations and especially the quest for status featured prominently in ancient Greece. Paying for liturgies, the private finance of public expenditure by wealthy individuals, offered the opportunity to acquire status by choosing the level of contributions to outperform rival providers. Effectively, liturgies were a system of finance of public provision through redistributive taxation sidestepping state administration of taxes and expenditures. Applying the insights of the economic approach to status, the paper examines status competition in ancient Athens and compares paying for liturgies with a hypothetical system of explicit income taxation of the rich. It is concluded that status seeking increased aggregate provision of public goods. The results formalise important aspects of substantivism and illustrate the value of formal economic analysis in the investigation of the ancient Greek economy.
Journal of Institutional Economics
Along with introducing democracy, advancing philosophy and excelling at the arts, during the peri... more Along with introducing democracy, advancing philosophy and excelling at the arts, during the period 800–300 bce ancient Greece achieved substantial economic prosperity. Recent literature attributes the efflorescence to the institutions and culture of democratic city-states. However, the city-states failed to initiate sustained growth. Technological progress remained slow and the economic efflorescence ended after the prevalence of Macedon and the subsequent Roman conquest. The present study scrutinises the roles of city-state institutions and culture. It shows that ultimately ancient Greece could not sustain long-run growth because a multitude of independent small city-states prevented the exploitation of economies of scale and stoked continual wars that exhausted them financially and militarily, and because of a culture valuing landholding, self-sufficiency and collectivist attitudes.
Transitional Economies, 2001
European Journal of Political Economy, 2011
The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control t... more The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control the government and share power on the basis of an election outcome under proportional representation. As the outcomes of conflict and elections are uncertain, for each rational player the choice depends on which setting secures the highest expected net payoff. Adopting the methodology of the economics of conflict, I show that the factors of crucial importance are attitudes to risk, the comparative effectiveness of the adversaries in contesting election relative to a war, the size of the benefits from office, how the benefits are shared in a power-sharing agreement, and the proportion of the benefits destroyed by fighting.
Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, 2017
The paper uses political economy perspectives to explore the abolition of monarchy in modern Gree... more The paper uses political economy perspectives to explore the abolition of monarchy in modern Greece. First it presents the oscillating fortunes of the Greek monarchy in the period 1832 – 1974. Noting that strictly speaking none of the standard explanations of the overthrow of the monarchy, war defeat, dissolution of the state, decolonization and revolution, applies to modern Greece, it embarks on an examination of proximate and ultimate causes of the fall of monarchy. In this connection, it analyses the legitimacy of the Greek monarchy, the erosion of its institutional credibility as a result of failures of the crown to abide by the constitutional rules it had promised to respect, and its rejection by the voters in the 1974 referendum that cut across the standard division of Right and Left and was overseen by a conservative incumbent.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 1990.
Constitutional Political Economy, 2010
Drawing on the 1974 Greek parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum which abolished t... more Drawing on the 1974 Greek parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum which abolished the monarchy, the paper employs a spatial decision model to examine the strategic use of a parliamentary election and a non mandatory referendum by an agenda setter. The parliamentary election bundles two issues, the right to form a government and the right to choose the form of state.
Homo Oeconomicus
Among the several thought provoking arguments for reforming democracy, Bruno Frey advocates sorti... more Among the several thought provoking arguments for reforming democracy, Bruno Frey advocates sortition, that is, appointment to (some) public offices by lottery. Sortition was the hallmark of the direct democracy of ancient Athens. The paper assesses the Athenian practice of sortition by the criteria of representativeness, equity, partisanship, rent seeking, resource economy, and suitability of candidates for office. It concludes that, in view of fundamental conceptual differences between the Athenian democracy and the modern representative government, introduction of sortition into modern representative democracy poses extremely demanding challenges.
In 1832 Prince Otto Wittelsbach of Bavaria was appointed King of the newly founded independent Gr... more In 1832 Prince Otto Wittelsbach of Bavaria was appointed King of the newly founded independent Greek state. Otto's reign was a momentous period for Greece, initially under Regency then under Otto as an absolute ruler and from 1843 as a constitutional monarch until his expulsion in 1862. Using the historical record the paper focuses on three political economy questions, namely, the rationale for the foundation of a state, which relates to the provision of public goods and rent distribution, the constitutional order of the state regarding the choice between monarchy or republic, and the emergence of democracy by revolution or evolution.
The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical cha... more The specific way the Athenians set up their democracy presents both theoretical and empirical challenges. Decisions were taken by majority vote in the Assembly. To keep politicians in line, the Athenians first used ostracism, which however was replaced by the graphe paranomon around 415 BCE. The latter provided that anybody who had made a proposal in the Assembly could be accused of having made an unconstitutional suggestion, bringing a potentially severe penalty if found guilty. We know of 35 such cases between 403 and 322. During the fourth century the notion of illegality was extended to a mere question of political undesirability. Henceforth any decision by the Assembly could be overturned by the courts, but if the accuser failed to get at least 20% of the jury votes, he was punished instead. While these rules can be seen as a safeguard against bad decisions, they also provided the Athenian politicians with important information about the relative strength of their political support. This effect has not been analysed before, and it may help explain the relative stability of political life in classical Athens. Furthermore this analysis also contributes to our understanding of a curious but often overlooked fact, namely that the decrees of the Athenian Assembly to a great extent concerned honorary rewards, and the use of the graphe paranomon in turn was largely focussed on the honorary decrees.
Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in ... more Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in the direct democracy of ancient Athens the assembly of the citizens met to decide policy up to forty times per year. The paper explores a model of constitutional choice where self-interested citizens decide how long to wait until they vote by maximising the net gain from an uncertain voting outcome. It is found that the frequency of voting increases unambiguously when the probability of being a member of the winning majority increases, and decreases with the loss from being a member of the losing minority and the resource cost of the vote. Under some plausible conditions, the frequency also rises with increases in the utility gain from the vote, the discount rate, and the required majority to pass a policy motion. It is argued that those conditions were met in Athens.
The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control t... more The paper analyses why office-motivated political rivals may agree to cease conflict to control the government and share power on the basis of an election outcome under proportional representation. As the outcomes of conflict and elections are uncertain, for each rational player the choice depends on which setting secures the highest expected net payoff. Adopting the methodology of the economics of conflict, I show that the factors of crucial importance are attitudes to risk, the comparative effectiveness of the adversaries in contesting election relative to a war, the size of the benefits from office, how the benefits are shared in a power-sharing agreement, and the proportion of the benefits destroyed by fighting.
The paper examines the choice of an incumbent government to call either a non-required referendum... more The paper examines the choice of an incumbent government to call either a non-required referendum or a parliamentary vote to ratify legislation, when there is uncertainty about the preferences of voters and elected representatives. Winning a referendum confers different gains from winning a parliamentary vote but requires different levels of effort to attract support. Differences in the preferences of the majority of voters and representatives, personal support for the incumbent and parliamentary party discipline emerge as determinants of the decision to call a non-required referendum.
In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility max... more In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility maximization to study voter demand for public expenditures. The model applies the median voter hypothesis to examine voter equilibrium when collective decisions concern the simultaneous determination of the tax rate to pay for the total size of public expenditures and the allocation of that total between exhaustive and transfer expenditures. Our findings suggest that the principal determinants of demand are relative prices, mean income, the trade-off between the disincentive effects of taxation and the benefits from public expenditures, and inequality in income distribution.
In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility max... more In the tradition of the median voter hypothesis this paper presents a formal model of utility maximization to study voter demand for public expenditures. The model applies the median voter hypothesis to examine voter equilibrium when collective decisions concern the simultaneous determination of the tax rate to pay for the total size of public expenditures and the allocation of that total between exhaustive and transfer expenditures. Our findings suggest that the principal determinants of demand are relative prices, mean income, the trade-off between the disincentive effects of taxation and the benefits from public expenditures, and inequality in income distribution.
Public Choice, 2016
Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years withou... more Ostracism, the removal of a political leader from ancient Athens for a period of ten years without any additional financial sanction or other punishment, was an important and rather unique institutional aspect of the direct democracy. The present study explains the adoption of ostracism as the utility maximizing choice of a self–interested constitutional writer—cum—political actor to resolve violent political conflict and illustrates that it acted as a type of negative referendum on politicians. Using notions from game theory and spatial decision modeling, the paper goes on to attribute the infrequent use of ostracism to its two-stage decision making process wherein the decisive voter of the first stage differed from the decisive voter of the second stage.