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We present a model of learning and policy choice across governments. Governments choose policies with known ideological positions but initially unknown valence benefits, possibly learning about those benefits between the model's two periods. There are two variants of the model; in one, governments only learn from their own experiences, whereas in the other they learn from one another's experiments. Based on similarities between these two versions, we illustrate that much accepted scholarly evidence of policy diffusion could simply have arisen through independent actions by governments that only learn from their own experiences. However, differences between the game-theoretic and decision-theoretic models point the way to future empirical tests that discern learning-based policy diffusion from independent policy adoptions.

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voter's expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight. An exception occurs when many high-weight voters exist, as low-weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power. The model also predicts that, ex post, the coalition formateur (the party chosen to form a coalition) will receive a disproportionately high payoff. Using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001, we find strong evidence of such formateur effects.

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to 'politicize' the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to voters in a way that will increase her electoral prospects, or she can 'insulate' the bureaucracy, which prevents all future winners from using the bureaucracy for electoral advantage. Our main result is that politicization persists when incumbents expect to win, and insulation takes place when they expect to lose. We test this hypothesis using data from the adoption of civil service reforms across the U.S. states. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical patterns leading up to the implementation of the general civil service reforms. Using both state and city level data, we observe an increase in partisan competition prior to the reforms. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Most government bureaucracies in developed countries use civil service systems. What accounts for their adoption? We develop and test a model of bureaucratic reforms under repeated partisan competition. In the model, two political parties composed of overlapping generations of candidates compete for office. Under a spoils system, an incumbent politician can either continue to "politicize" the bureaucracy, which allows her to direct benefits to voters in a way that will increase her electoral prospects, or she can "insulate" the bureaucracy, which prevents all future winners from using the bureaucracy for electoral advantage. Our main result is that politicization persists when incumbents expect to win, and insulation takes place when they expect to lose. We test this hypothesis using data from the adoption of civil service reforms across the U.S. states. The predictions of the model are consistent with the empirical patterns leading up to the implementation of the general civil service reforms. Using both state and city level data, we observe an increase in partisan competition prior to the reforms.

Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal‐integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts. We find that for parties that join (but did not form) the government, there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts. The party that forms the government (the formateur) receives a substantial "bonus" relative to its voting weight. The latter finding is more consistent with proposal‐based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power.