Rules of the game matter more than particular plays.
Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent, 1962, and the body of work recognised by Buchanan's 1986 Nobel Prize: arguing about tax rates within a constitution differs in kind from arguing about what the constitution permits. Reformers usually contest plays when the rules are what determine outcomes.
In practice
- An argument about the tax rate is a play; an argument about who may set the tax rate is a rule, and the second decides the first for a generation.
- A club argues for years about individual membership decisions and never about who gets to decide them.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works