This book analyzes the links between political economics, governance structures and the distribution of political power in economic policy making.

Part I. Political Power and Economic Analysis: 1. Public policy: the lens of political economy; 2. The Nash solution to the bargaining problem; 3. The Harsanyi solution to the bargaining problem; 4. Political-economic analysis; 5. Normative political-economic analysis; 6. Dynamic political-economic analysis; Part II. Ideology, Prescription, and Political Power Coefficients: 7. Political power, ideology, and political organizational structures; 8. Political power, influence, and lobbying; 9. Constitutional prescription and political power coefficients; Part III. Analysis of Specific Structures: 10. The political economy of commodity market intervention; 11. The political economy of public research and development; 12. Political-economic analysis of redistributive policy and public good investments; 13. Interest groups, coalition breaking, and productive policies; 14. Policy reform and compensation; 15. Political-economic analysis of land reform; 16. Political-economic analysis of water resource systems; 17. The political-economic lens on quality and public standard regulations; 18. Political-economic analysis in transition economies; 19. The power of bureaucracies: the European commission and EU policy reforms; Part IV. Empirical Applications of Political Power Estimation: 20. Political econometrics; 21. The political econometrics of the Israeli dairy industry; 22. Flexible policy instruments given a political power distribution; 23. Estimating statistical properties of power weight parameters and their temporal shifts; 24. Role of institutions in the joint determination of PERTs and PESTs.

Gordon C. Rausser is the Robert Gordon Sproul Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley. He has taught economics and statistics at several eminent universities, served as Dean of the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and twice served as Chair of the Giannini Foundation. Professor Rausser is the author or editor of 18 books, including co-editor of the four-volume Handbook of Agricultural Economics with Bruce L. Gardner; he has won 16 national awards and honors for teaching and research. He has been an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and an editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and he was recently named editor of the Annual Review of Resource Economics. He has also served as Senior Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisors and Chief Economist at the Agency for International Development in Washington, DC. He co-founded LECG, Inc., and the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Reform. He has been elected a Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.