CALL FOR PAPERS
SECOND WORLD CONGRESS OF THE PUBLIC CHOICE SOCIETIES
Hyatt Regency Miami, Miami, Florida
8-11 March 2012
(Thursday, March 8, Registration Only)

Important Dates
December 1, 2011Abstract, draft of paper, and registration fee due
February 12, 2012Final paper due
February 16, 2012Hotel room reservations due

In March 2012 the Public Choice Society (Lawrence W. Kenny, President), the Australasian Public Choice Society (David Fielding, Conference Coordinator), the European Public Choice Society (Jan-Egburt Sturm, President), and the Japanese Public Choice Society (Hiroo Harada, President) will join together to offer the 2d World Congress of the Public Choice Societies. The 1st World Congress was held in Amsterdam in 1997 and was quite successful. More recently, many found the sessions at this year's 2011 Public Choice Society meetings in San Antonio to be stimulating. We hope that the larger world meetings will be even more so and look forward to hosting this event.

The year 2012 will also mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Buchanan and Tullock's classic The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. This congress is a perfect opportunity to honor this seminal work. We are very pleased that Nobel laureate James Buchanan has agreed to provisional participation. We are hopeful that Gordon Tullock also will be able to attend. In the late morning session on Friday, we will offer a special plenary session on the impact of the book and on the lifetime contributions of Buchanan and Tullock. If you would like to submit a paper or organize a session around the Calculus or around Buchanan and/or Tullock, we would be delighted to include it in the program.

Join us in stimulating sessions throughout the meetings. The plenary sessions, which are open to all participants, are one of the highlights of the conference. This year's plenary sessions are:

Friday
Special Plenary Session


The Impact of The Calculus of Consent.
Geoffrey Brennan (Australian National University; Duke University)
Dwight Lee (Southern Methodist University)


Contributions of James M. Buchanan
Randall Holcombe (Florida State University)
Hartmut Kliemt (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management)


Contributions of Gordon Tullock
Roger Congleton (West Virginia University)
Heinrich Ursprung (University of Konstanz)
Ayre Hillman (Bar-Ilan University)


*****

Nolan McCarty (Princeton), "Party Polarization in the United States" 5:45-7:00 p.m.

Saturday
Rick van der Ploeg (University of Oxford), "Political Economy of Natural Resource Windfalls"


Sunday
Presidential Addresses
Larry Kenny (University of Florida), Public Choice Society
Jan-Egbert Sturm (KOF ETH Zurich), European Public Choice Society


The conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Miami. Registration will start on the afternoon of Thursday, March 8, and sessions will run from 8 a.m. Friday, March 9, to noon Sunday, March 11, 2012. The conference room rate is $199 per night. There are numerous direct flights between the major European and Asian airports and Miami. The Hyatt Regency Miami is in the top 10 of 118 Hyatt hotels in overall customer service and is a 4 star/4 diamond hotel. The hotel underwent a major renovation in 2008. The hotel is located in downtown Miami and has spectacular views of the Miami River. Numerous restaurants are within a few blocks of the hotel, and a monorail ("metro mover") provides access to more distant downtown shops and restaurants. The beach and South Beach are a 15-20 minute drive away. Extend your time in Miami to take advantage of the nearby beaches or a Caribbean cruise; several days on either side of the conference are available to attendees at the conference rate.

Please convey this announcement to any colleagues who have research interests related to public choice but who may not have attended recent (or any) PCS meetings and who therefore may not be on our email list. Since the political science side of our interdisciplinary society has been underrepresented in recent PCS meetings, I also want especially to urge participation by political scientists who do public-choice based research. I particularly invite you to consider assembling three or four related papers into a proposal for a complete session (including discussants, if you wish). If this is of interest to you, it is not too soon to get in contact with prospective panel members. Please do not send your proposed panel selection until you have received confirmation from all participants.

Participation
Most sessions will have three paper presenters and three discussants. One of these session participants also will serve as chair of the session, keeping the participants on time. Each paper presenter is expected to serve as a discussant or chair on another panel. Indicate your preferences on the registration form.


Membership
Please recall that we now offer formal membership in the society for $30 a year ($15 for student members). Membership offers significant savings in registration fees net of the membership fee and, as in recent past years, in subscription rates to Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, and the Review of Austrian of Economics. A separate letter detailing rates and fees will follow shortly.


New Application Procedures
To help deal with the problem of no-shows, we now require that you send us a draft of your paper along with your abstract. The paper will be evaluated with the recognition that the author will have three months to flesh out and fine-tune the paper before the meetings. Note also that the deadlines are a little earlier this year; this will give us more time to put a larger program together.

To bring about some savings in processing costs, the abstract, draft of paper, and registration fee have the same deadline (November 15). This procedure applies to organized sessions as well as individual submissions. Separate submissions of the abstract and paper draft are now reduced to one email, and separate transactions involving the deposit and the registration fee now can be done in one transaction involving payment of the registration fee.

It is expected that most applicants will take advantage of having only one submission transaction and only one financial transaction, taking care of both during the same day. Some may be concerned about paying the registration fee before ascertaining whether the paper is acceptable, even though the registration fee (less $50) will be refunded if the paper is deemed unacceptable. We guarantee that a decision on a paper’s acceptability will take no more than two weeks. If the abstract and paper were submitted on November 1, the applicant would learn by November 15 that the paper had been accepted, allowing payment of the registration fee by the November 15 deadline.

Abstract and Registration
The registration and abstract forms have been combined. Please refer to the website for online submission or to download a copy for manual submission. Do not forget to include coauthor information. IF ANY ITEM IS MISSING, YOUR REGISTRATION FORM WILL BE RETURNED.

You may, of course, propose more than one paper, in which case the abstract and registration form must be completed for each submission. (Please note participation requirements apply to each paper presented. See above.) If additional paper proposals are submitted, there will be a $50 administrative fee charged, but you will not be charged an additional registration fee.

Draft and Final Papers
Please submit your paper draft(s) by email as a PDF attachment(s) for each paper draft. Send email to pubchsoc@gmu.edu. All non-.PDFs will be returned.
-Only if email is really not feasible, may you mail or fax your proposals to:
Public Choice Society c/o Jo Ann Burgess
Buchanan House, MSN-1E6
4400 University Drive
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030 USA
T:703-993-2337
F:703-993-2334


Registration Fees (online registration will open September 25, 2011)
The registration fee will be $210 for members of the Society and $260 for nonmembers, with students entitled to a discounted rate of $140 for members and $175 for nonmembers. If you are not a PCS member, you can join for $30 (see above); becoming a member allows a discount of $20 on both the regular and student registration fees if you attend the meeting. Please note that this registration fee includes a continental breakfast buffet each morning; coffee and tea between sessions; an evening reception on Friday with substantial food as well as a cash bar; and the society luncheon on Saturday. Registration fees are nonrefundable (except when the paper is deemed unacceptable less a $50 administrative fee); those who have not paid on time may be dropped from the program. Please be courteous and inform the society immediately if it turns out that you cannot attend. Due to the large number of no-shows, we can no longer accept payment on site.
The PayPal account on the PCS webpage will be open for payment of the registration fee on September 25, 2011, or you can mail a check made out to the Public Choice Society to Jo Ann Burgess at the address given above.

Organized Session Proposals
If you want to propose an entire organized panel session (typically including three or four papers), please send us the following information in a single proposal (which will likely be more than a single page):
  • Your name and contact information as the panel organizer to whom all follow-up correspondence will be sent.
  • All the information requested for an individual submission as listed on the registration form for each paper included on your panel; one page per author.
  • Each participant in the conference must pay the registration fee.
  • Names and contact information for each discussant you may recruit for the panel.
  • Alternatively we can assign discussants to your panel in the normal manner, but you must so indicate at the time of submission.
  • Separate PDF attachments still are needed for each paper in the session.
Please do not send your proposed panel selection until you have received confirmation from all participants.

Hotel Registration
The PCS rate for rooms in the Hyatt Regency Miami is $199 (plus applicable taxes) per night for either single or double occupancy. To make a reservation, use the link below:

Hotel Registration

This will pull up the reservations window for the PCS conference.

The last day to obtain the $199 group rate is Wednesday, February 16, 2012.

A $200 meeting registration surcharge will apply if you do not stay in the Hyatt Regency Miami as a member of the PCS group, and a $100 surcharge will apply if you stay in the hotel for only one night. The surcharge is applied because the society does not pay the hotel directly for use of its meeting rooms. Rather we promise that a given number of our attendees will stay in the hotel each night (and also that we will spend a given amount on catered food and beverages). Without such a surcharge, PCS attendees who do not stay in the hotel would not be paying their fair share of the meeting expenses. (The hotel provides us with a list of our bloc attendees, including the number of nights registered. Please don’t attempt to free-ride. If the surcharge is not submitted before the meeting, it will be collected at registration.)

Additional Responsibilities
As noted above, people whose papers are accepted on the program are expected also to serve as discussants. You therefore should plan on attending the entire meeting. Typical panel sessions have three or four papers and three or four discussants. Session chairs will be drawn from the paper givers and discussants in the session. The principal duty of the chair is to keep the session’s participants on time. Please volunteer to be a chair!

You will receive further information and reminders of deadlines later in the coming months, with all forms being active for the 2012 meetings by September 25.

http://www.pubchoicesoc.org

Please make arrangements with your class schedule so that you will be able to attend the full conference. I look forward to an outstanding conference and seeing you in Miami!

Larry Kenny
President
kenny@ufl.edu 		  Dear Public Choice Society Members and Friends,

We begin the fall semester with our membership drive. Membership allows you to pledge your continuing support of the Public Choice Society either by renewing your current membership or by becoming a member for the first time. Membership offers significant savings in registration fees and in subscription rates to Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, and Review of Austrian Economics.

Basic memberships are still just $30; members receive a $50 discount on the registration fee for the annual meeting. The membership fee of $30 along with the registration fee for members of $210 is $20 less than the nonmember registration fee of $260. Student memberships cost $15. This, coupled with a discounted student member registration fee of $150, represents a saving of $20 over the student nonmember registration fee ($175).

In concert with Springer, the publisher of Public Choice, the society will again offer to its members discount subscriptions for either the print or electronic version of the journal. Springer did not change its cost for an electronic subscription but increased the cost of the print subscription significantly. The fee for membership coupled with an electronic subscription is $95. The charge for membership along with a electronic and print subscription is $160. The additional cost (net of the $30 membership fee) of an electronic subscription ($65) and the additional cost of an electronic and print subscription ($130) is quite small in today's journal market.

Our agreement with Springer also allows us to extend deep discounts for subscriptions to Constitutional Political Economy and the Review of Austrian Economics. For each journal, the charge for membership along with an electronic subscription equals $55. An electronic subscription for all three journals costs $175. An electronic and print subscription to Public Choice along with electronic subscriptions to the other two journals costs $240.

Please remember that your membership is an important part of ongoing support of the Public Choice Society. To join the society, renew your membership, or subscribe to the journal, go to http://www.pubchoicesoc.org/membership.html, for complete online information. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to contact me, Jo Ann Burgess, at pubchsoc@gmu.edu.

All membership payments must be received by December 31, 2011.

Please do join or renew and help support the Public Choice Society.

Sincerely,
Jo Ann Burgess


Dr. Lawrence W. (Larry) Kenny, President

Public Choice Society
University of Florida
Warrington College of Business Administration
Department of Economics
PO Box 117140
313 MAT
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7140 USA
Tel: 352.392.0117
email: larry.kenny@warrington.ufl.edu