The title of this volume is Economic Models in Political Science. 1 It has been the aim of the Lugano conference in 2003 and in this special issue, which comprises a selection of the conference papers, to bring economists and political scientists together and discuss issues, which are topical in both disciplines from both perspectives. This endeavor has promised to open new perspectives to the proponents of each discipline on the research questions they are interested in. During the conference and the completion of this issue, a development has set in that has required the participants to re-think their arguments from the point of view of the sister social science. Although it might seem natural from the perception of open-minded scientists accepting criticism of their arguments in order to improve them, this is not necessarily obvious whenever these criticisms come from another discipline. This holds especially in the social sciences where political scientists sometimes accuse economists of imperialism and economists question the usefulness of realism for analytical outcomes. Some of the participants may even remember the occasions of the past where language differences between both disciplines have prevented such a dialogue from happening at all.
In the discussions of each of the four general topics, the authors, the formal discussants and the additional participants revealed that they are surprisingly close to the others' arguments in many instances, but at the same time sufficiently far away to claim differences. For example, the two papers on fiscal policy by KΓΆnig and Troeger as well as by KirchgΓ€ssner both start from a rational choice approach, both combine analytical rigor with an empirical emphasis, both are somehow concerned with the role of veto players in fiscal policy and how institutions shape the influence of veto players. However, the focus of KirchgΓ€ssner is on the restrictions imposed by such institutions as fiscal referendums and formal fiscal constraints on budgetary outcomes, while KΓΆnig and Troeger emphasize the importance of preference configurations in shifts of the budget allocation. Although the budgetary outcomes looked at by both authors are the result of an interaction of preferences and restraints as in traditional household