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The growth of government has long been a core issue of public economics with a vast array of hypotheses offered and empirical investigations conducted. One key element of this quest, with respect to democratic governments, has been the size of the legislature which is seen increasing, decreasing, or neutral with respect to the growth of government. We argue that the inconclusive empirical results are the result of a misspecification and that instead of legislature size, it is constituency size that matters and that the larger the constituency size, the more government grows because of poorer representation. We test this hypothesis using the case of the United Kingdom over the 20th century and find that constituency size is positively related to the growth of government.
The October Revolution in Russia is better understood in light of Gordon Tullock’s by-product theory of revolution. This approach entails a focus on private costs and benefits rather than on public goods. It is shown that in terms of economic development, fiscal stability, and income distribution, that is, public goods, conditions in late-tsarist Russia were improving, not deteriorating, as the revolution approached. We reinterpret the impact of the many political concessions that followed the earlier Russian Revolution of 1905 and conclude that they had ultimately increased, rather than decreased, the probability of revolution. Finally, we show that various forms of foreign intervention (financial, military, and philosophical) made the unlikely Lenin the ultimate victor in the outcome of the Russian Revolution.
