The Buchanan-Tullock Model: Some Extensions

In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop extensions. The present paper seeks to explicate this important model so as to clarify the framework in certain important ways and then to extend the model by introducing explicit considerations of such dimensions as group size and group preference heterogeneity as explicit variables.