Gordon Tullock made fundamental conceptual contributions to the understanding of collective choices. Tullock balanced an optimism about the capacity of political choices to facilitate gains from exchange with a pessimism about the negative externalities attending having majorities control power and dictate choices for all. Tullock's work on both sides of this divide is surveyed, examining both the problems of voting procedures, and the promise of the demand-revealing process he helped invent, in guiding the choice of political institutions. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.