Institutional arrangements constitute the "rules of the game" for any civil and political society. To understand urban politics and policy making, including issues dealing with economic development, zoning, constituency representation, government borrowing, and service contract decisions, discovering institutional regularities is key. To achieve this the authors combine older institutional approaches emphasizing formal structure and governance organizations with newer approaches and transaction cost theory. Institutional Constraints and Policy Choice contends that institutional arrangements both shape and are shaped by human behavior, and when combined with contextual factors and the uncertainty associated with leadership turnover provide the basis of understanding how decisions are made at the level of local government.

Demonstrates how governmental structure and institutional rules determine who gets what in American cities.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

This is part of a ten volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. This work explores the business end of politics, where theory meets practice in the pursuit of public good.

This book, subtitled "political actors in institutional settings", addresses the main lines of reasoning of the new political institutionalism and rational choice theory. It discusses the question: Which particular rules, logics, or strategies of action can be found in the realm of politics?

Using interview evidence and archival data from Argentina, the book examines why and when women collaborate in Congress.

Argues that public finance--the study of the government's role in economics--should incorporate principles from behavior economics and other branches of psychology.