Parliament became … the market where the favors of the state, both great and small, were negotiated. (De Viti de Marco 1930, p. vii).
Abstract
It is well known that one of the features of public choice, political realism, is embedded in a time-honored Italian tradition going back to Machiavelli and perpetuated by G. Mosca and V. Pareto in their political and sociological writings. The scientific spirit, which in their era led to the foundation of various social disciplines, fostered the application of economic analysis to the political sphere. In that context, Antonio de Viti de Marco (1858–1943) formulated an economic model of the state, consisting of two types of constitutional extremes: the absolute state and the democratic state. We ask herein how that model may be reconciled to G. Mosca and Pareto’s theory of the ruling class, with which De Viti de Marco agreed. Finally, we analyze his political writings in order to reconstruct his interpretation of collusion, rent seeking and “clientelism”, i.e., the redistribution of extracted rent, which takes place in the form of discretionary allocations of public jobs, public contracts and other corporative favors. Collusion is the use of democratic institutions by the ruling classes in order to gain monopoly power. While collusion is the basis of rent creation, rent extraction is not the final goal of politicians; rather, it is a means of strengthening electoral support.
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Notes
Such as the growth of the public sector.
See Moss (1991), who explains how one may at the same time go back to both Hobbes and Hume.
See, for instance, Da Empoli (2015), who points out this difference between the Italian Scienza delle Finanze, the public choice school and the public economics tradition, which dates back to Wicksell, Lindhal, Musgrave and Peacock, among others.
Bobbio (1972, p. 42) writes that sociology for Pareto is “an introduction to the study of economics, not an independent discipline”. In this paper the translations are ours, where they are not already available.
Medema (2005) notes that in Italy the separation of public finance from economics concerned both its scholarly literature and its educational curriculum.
Finoia (1995, p. 10) recalls that the Italian polemic between free traders and interventionists was based on the conception of the state and its functions.
Buchanan (1960) recognizes this characteristic in the Italian scholars.
The German and Italian scholars of public finance also are compared in Fossati (2003).
Faucci (2000) writes that the eighteenth century Italian economists were subjectivists (value as a mental judgment), hedonists (the individual seeks to maximize pleasure) and utilitarians (the aim of society is to obtain “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”).
For a vivid description of the first steps in the foundation of public finance as pure theory, see Einaudi’s (1936) account.
Buchanan (2003) specifies in addition that governments were modelled by Marxists as furthering class interests, but governments that might be installed after the revolution would become both omniscient and benevolent.
They are both individualistic because in both models public choices emerge from relations between individuals with different preferences (Da Empoli 1995).
In the words of Dallera (2003), “Public finance became a field of interest for political science and a theme for political sociology, sometimes as a political model, sometimes as a sociological model”.
Italy was born in 1861 as a constitutional monarchy, in which the right to vote was restricted to 2% of the population.
Wagner (2003), too, points out that “The neo-classical public finance that emerged in the late 19th century was articulated within a democratic political context”.
In the words of Da Empoli (1993, p. 78) “All of the authors mentioned were staunch supporters of the market according to the liberal classical tradition and were very critical of governmental policies, whose rent-seeking aspects were … criticized by them on many occasions”.
Da Empoli (1989) advanced the hypothesis that the individualistic approach in the study of public economics in Italy was born precisely from the wish to channel state intervention along more equitable and rational lines.
We exclude some other topics, as for example the median voter (see, for instance, Da Empoli 2015).
The first edition was published in 1928, the last in 1939.
Together with Pantaleoni, Mazzola and then Pareto, he played a fundamental role in the rebirth of the Giornale degli economisti, for which he wrote Cronache (Chronicles) from 1897 to 1899; from 1911 to 1913 he published weekly in Il Popolo, a journal of his electoral constituency; in 1911, he began collaboration with G. Salvemini’s L’Unità, in which he wrote regularly from 1914 to 1920, while from 1916 to 1918 he was its co-director.
In the words of De Viti ([1928] 1936, p. 42), “which wants and which individual and group interests help to form the State’s calculation of advantage and disadvantage, and which wants may happen to be excluded from this calculation?”.
On this, see also Da Empoli (2004, p. 331).
We are referring here to the notion of ideal type associated with Max Weber.
It is also interesting to see Buchanan (1985, p. 41) arguing that “It is, of course, no accident that constitutional democracy … emerged in the post-Enlightenment period, and that it finds intellectual support in the eighteenth century discovery of the spontaneous coordination properties of the market economy”.
That point also is reiterated by Buchanan (1975, p. 384): “De Viti de Marco explicitly constructed a model in which the consumers and the suppliers-producers of public goods make up the same community of persons”.
See Fusco (1994, p. XIX), who quotes Einaudi in the introductory note.
According to Fossati (2015), any (and every) political group can rise to power; as long as competition takes place through voting mechanisms, the current ruling group can be replaced by any other, and the group that is more efficient in the production of public goods will prevail.
De Viti’s ([1928] 1936, p. 43) complete quote is: “we have merely to imagine that the alternation of the groups in control of the government takes place with sufficient rapidity, and we finally come to consider as practically identical the groups that are in turn governing and governed. This brings out exactly the concept of co-operative society, the essential characteristic of which lies in the personal identity of producers and consumers.”.
In his criticism of Arrow and Black’s ideas on majority cycles.
In the following quotation, it would seem that an analogy also can be found between the two in the result: “majority decision making itself becomes a means through which the whole group ultimately attains consensus, that is, makes a genuine social choice. It serves to ensure that competing alternatives may be experimentally and provisionally adopted, tested, and replaced by new compromise alternatives approved by a majority group ever changing composition. This is democratic choice process” (Buchanan [1954] 1987, p. 176). But Buchanan’s (1959) essay seems to confirm the more prudent interpretation, which we have provided in the text.
The absolute state for De Viti de Marco (1902–1903, p. 15) “answers to an historical truth [in which] the class that possesses the privileges of the state, looks after its own interests and not those of the ruled, as happened before the French Revolution for the first and second estates, to the prejudice of the third, ruled.”.
Fossati (2015, p. 13) argues that De Viti was convinced that, in the historical moment in which he was living, the State was democratic or popular, insofar as “taxpayers vote the taxes”.
De Viti’s letter to B. Griziotti, quoted in Cardini (1985, p. 13).
Eusepi and Wagner (2013), are an exception, i.e., they recognize that characteristic, even if briefly. They studied the specific subject of De Viti de Marco’s formulation of tax prices, and the importance of constitutional arrangements in his theory of public finance. Petretto (2014) links the work of De Viti with political economy. Fossati (2015, p. 6) cites Rossi’s review: “De Viti sometimes moves away from the polar case of cooperative state, and thus his wording becomes complex and confusing”.
Fossati (2015), in an article that is a complete, critical re-reading of the Principles, compares the theoretical framework with the concrete issues, but by the latter Fossati does not mean the political and fiscal situation actually existing in De Viti’s time, but rather the various topics public finance dealt with in the Principles themselves (such as the effects of taxation, discussions of public debt, the theories of progressivity-proportionality of taxes).
Bobbio (1972, p. 19 and p. 25) does the same with G. Mosca.
And, in fact, Buchanan (1983, p. 13), concerning the hypothesis of homo oeconomicus as a foundation of public choice, refers to De Viti. The latter, as in the public choice approach, “assumes that representatives, like voters, are rational, economic men bent on maximizing their utilities” (Mueller 1976, § III).
“Until the direct-democratic ideal is attained … within the framework of the ubiquitous representative-democratic constitutional system, not the taxpayers but their elected agents will continue to decide … what public goods to produce and how to distribute the tax burden among the constituents” (Kayaalp 1998, pp. 101–102).
In Papa’s (1965, p. 192) words, “De Viti was immune to suggestions of the myth of good government”.
The expression “rent seeking” was first introduced by Krueger (1974).
“Incomplete democracy” is in the title of De Viti’s political biography by Cardini (1985).
Di Liddo and Giuranno (2016) show that incumbents increase rent extraction with cooperative, rather than non-cooperative, political behavior.
We are aware that, when speaking of rent seeking, it would be interesting to confront De Viti with Tullock (1967, 2003), but this would lead us out of the main line of our inquiry. An examination in historical perspective of the work of Tullock along those lines will be the subject of further research.
De Viti ([1898] 1930, p. 253) continues: “he can vote the duty on wheat, or the protectionist tariff, or the breaking of a treaty of commerce, or the African expedition, or war, or taxes; all this he can do; for moving a prefect or a magistrate, or for a pardon or an amnesty for fines, or for an arrangement with the tax officer”.
On another occasion, he writes: “Otherwise, it would remain inexplicable what interest brought crowds of members of parliament from the South [of Italy] to Rome, with the task, apparently, of just passing laws of greater spoliation of their provinces” (De Viti de Marco [1894] 1930, p. 209).
“Prefetto” and “Questore” are appointed by the central government.
Here, we should note that De Viti anticipated the basis of the tradeoff between decision-making costs and external costs, which determines the optimal collective decision-making rule, later developed by Buchanan and Tullock (1962).
The quotation continues: “The political battles, born of pretty careful scientific enquiry and reflection … often provided an experimental basis for theoretical research which on the other hand allowed him an overall view of the nature of the state and what it should be like” (Cardini 1994, p. 187).
Already in G. Mosca, the contradiction between liberalism and a theory of the elites is apparent. See The Myth of the Ruling Class (Meisel 1958).
Steve (1995, p. 44) answers our question like this: “it may be suggested that De Viti had hoped, up until the advent of Fascism, that the conditions for a democratic public finance could be reconstructed”.
In Italy, women’s suffrage was introduced only in the 1946 elections.
According to Cardini (1994, p. 189), De Viti believed that “the contemporary states were moving towards collective participation in the administration of the state”.
He states that the US president does act “in defense of American interests; but these interests, for their scale, and for their recent and democratic origin, coincide with the immediate interests of the greater number and correspond to those of the lower strata of the countries of the civilized world” (De Viti de Marco [1917b] 1918, p. 144); also see Martelloni and Mosca (2018).
“For some thirty to thirty-five years I have been fighting for the reform of the regime that you call bourgeois, denouncing its increasing privileges and degeneration, in the hope that the ruling class is capable of reforming itself. My life has gone by in this way, perhaps unprofitably” (De Viti de Marco 1920, p. 3787).
Buchanan (1975, p. 385): “The Italians devoted much more attention to the implications of non-democratic political structures for the emergence and viability of fiscal institutions, on both the tax and the expenditure sides, than did their continental counterparts”. And, likewise, “Precursors of supply-side analysis can, of course, be found in the Italian theory of public finance in the non-democratic or monopolistic state. Models of this political structure were developed in some detail, models in which some ruling group or class collects taxes from the masses who are ruled and utilizes the proceeds to its own maximum advantage” (Buchanan 1975, p. 388). Buchanan (1978, p. 11) cites Machiavelli, Pareto, G. Mosca, De Viti, Puviani and Fasiani.
In other words, to “model the way politics works, the way the state works” (Buchanan [2011] 2016, p. 130). What the American economist remembers asking in his 1949 work was to “pay some attention to the models of politics” (Buchanan 2003); in that path-breaking article, Buchanan cites De Viti several times. We agree with Da Empoli (1989, p. 16) that in Buchanan’s (1949) essay, De Viti de Marco’s influence is clear. De Viti’s influence on public choice also is recognized by Salsman (2017).
Our interpretation contradicts that of Giardina (1992, p. 146), according to which De Viti’s theory does not allow us to go “deeper into public decision processes in systems of representative democracy”; in fact, Giardina puts Pareto “at the basis of the contemporary theories on pressure groups” (p. 164).
And, as mentioned above, to many other Italians, and, in general, to Italian political culture.
Incidentally, the subject we have examined also resolves other historiographical controversies. The first concerns De Viti’s place in the area of voluntary-exchange theory (Fausto 1995, p. 16). Our analysis leads us to conclude that De Viti’s political opinions actually recall the opposite, political-sociological approach. Boccaccio and De Bonis (2003) point out that the attention to institutions is a characteristic of the Italian tradition, to be found not only in authors adopting the political-sociological approach, but also the voluntary-exchange approach. The second controversy relates to the possibility of tracing the concept of “government failure” in De Viti’s thought. His interpreters don’t usually attribute that possibility to him; it is recognized by Medema (2005, p. 13), however, who anchors his analysis only on De Viti’s Principles, considering government failure therein as just a “potential” contribution (p. 14). The analysis of both the political and scientific writings of De Viti de Marco that we have carried out here also reveals his positions concerning those two watersheds in the history of political economic thought.
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Acknowledgements
Paper presented at the AEA/ASSA Conference, San Francisco, 3–5 January 2016, the AISPE Conference, Lecce, 28–30 April 2016; the SIEP Annual meeting, 22–23 September 2016, Lecce, and the SIE Conference, 19–21 October 2017, Cosenza. The authors would like to thank Richard Wagner, Roger Congleton, Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, Roberto Cellini, Domenico da Empoli, Amedeo Fossati, Massimo Paradiso and the other participants in the sessions. Michele Giuranno is grateful to Gabriella Punzi for her valuable research assistantship. We also thank two anonymous referees for their very useful suggestions.
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Giuranno, M.G., Mosca, M. Political realism and models of the state: Antonio de Viti de Marco and the origins of public choice. Public Choice 175, 325–345 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0539-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-018-0539-z