Michael C. Munger - Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited

This book is an introduction to the logic and analytics of group choice. To understand how political institutions work, it is important to isolate what citizens as individuals and as members of society actually want. This book develops a means of representing the preferences of citizens so that institutions can be studied more carefully. This is the first book to integrate the classical problem of constitutions with modern spatial theory, connecting Aristotle and Montesquieu with Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan.

MICHAEL C. MUNGER is a professor of political science and economics and the director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program at Duke University. He formerly served as a staff economist at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. He has published four books and has contributed to the American Journal of Political Science , the American Political Science Review , the Journal of Law and Economics , and the Journal of Politics . He was North American editor of Public Choice from 2006 to 2010 and is a past president of the Public Choice Society. He currently coedits The Independent Review . Munger has won three teaching awards at Duke, and he gave the 2012 Toby Davis Lecture at George Mason University.

KEVIN M. MUNGER is a PhD student in New York Universitys Department of Politics, focusing on comparative political economy. Munger spent a year as an investigator at La Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD) in Santiago, Chile. He holds a degree in mathematics and economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1997, Melvin Hinich and I coauthored a book, also published by Cambridge University Press, called Analytical Politics . It subsequently was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The book used spatial theory to bridge the gap between philosophical and mathematical treatments of politics.

We started to think about a second edition in the late 2000s. I had been a department chair at Duke University for ten years, and I wanted to get back to academic work. After Mel and I had a series of phone conversations, we planned to revise the first edition along the lines that Jeffrey Banks had suggested in an insightful review in the Journal of Economic Literature .

On Sunday, September 5, 2010, we talked on the phone. Mel was excited about the example we were planning to use to introduce the new book: the problem of group choice Meriwether Lewis and William Clark faced during their 1805 Corps of Discovery expedition. We hung up pledging to talk again later in the week.

But that never happened. On the morning of Monday, September 6, Melvin fell down the stairs in his home in Austin, Texas. He did not survive the fall.

After that, I put the book aside for more than a year. Mel had participated, over more than three decades, in the creation of many of the spatial models discussed in the 1997 book, and his sense of scientific advances in modeling was invaluable. I couldnt do it without him.

That is why I resolved to write a quite different book, one that in some ways would be less than I could have achieved with Mel, but that at least started from the preliminary plans we had made. I enlisted a new collaborator, my older son Kevin Munger of New York University, to update and expand the topics covered. He also is responsible for , and he did most of the work on the problems at the end of the chapters.

I hope Melvin would have been proud of the result. Though he was not able to participate in the writing of the final version, his intellectual fingerprints are are adaptations of similar material in the 1997 book, though they are substantially reorganized and updated.

The book is new, however, because the motivation and organization are completely different. In large measure, this is because I tried to respond to Jeff Bankss suggestions. The problem of choosing in groups starts several steps earlier in terms of conceptual framework, considering the problem of why voluntary associations exist and how they are constituted. Given the debt owed, it is a shame that Jeff Banks, like Mel, is no longer with us to see the result.

I offer thanks to the many who have made comments and suggestions. The problem with listing people is that we are sure to forget some, and that omission is unintentional. But I want especially to thank John Aldrich, Jonny Anomaly, Geoffrey Brennan, Scott de Marchi, Ricardo Guzman, and Georg Vanberg for their suggestions and criticisms. My teaching assistants, Darren Beattie, Cindy Cheng, Matthew Cole, Clyde Ray, and Guadalupe Rojo, made it possible for me to get some work done while teaching three classes in fall 2013.