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To understand the foundations of American political institutions, it's necessary to understand the rationale for British colonial institutions that survived the empire. Political institutions in England's American colonies were neither direct imports from England, nor home-grown creations of autonomous colonists. Instead, they emerged from efforts of the English Crown to assert control over their colonies amid limited English state and military capacity. Agents of Empire explores the strategic dilemmas facing a constrained crown in its attempts to assert control. The study argues that colonial institutions emerged from the crown's management of authority delegated to agents-first companies and proprietors establishing colonies; then imperial officials governing the polities they created. The institutions remaining from these strategic dynamics form the building blocks of federalism, legislative power, separation of powers, judicial review, and other institutions that comprise the American polity today

"Provides a new strategic logic of English imperial government in North American colonies, and why the crown was ultimately unable to control them. It shows how strategic dynamics in colonial institutions structured American state building. For readers in comparative state formation, imperial legacies, political economy, and American politics"--

"This book provides an introduction to probability theory, statistical inference, and statistical modeling for social science researchers and Ph.D. students. Focusing on the connection between statistical procedures and social science theory, Sean Gailmard develops core statistical theory as a set of tools to model and assess relationships between variables - the primary aim of social scientists. Gailmard explains how social scientists express and test substantive theoretical arguments in various models. Chapter exercises require application of concepts to actual data and extend students' grasp of core theoretical concepts. Students will complete the book with the ability to read and critique statistical applications in their fields of interest"--

AbstractThe power of assemblies in the British new world grew far beyond the bounds intended at their creation. Although the British crown instructed royal governors to use legal powers to restrain assemblies, they were unsuccessful. I develop a formal model to account for this. In this model colonial assemblies can challenge the agenda setting powers of colonial governors. "Strong" governors withstand these challenges easily; "weak" ones prefer to capitulate. The crown wishes to retain only strong governors; however, it observes only policy outcomes but not the resolution of challenges to the governor's agenda power. In equilibrium, the crown cannot distinguish between a strong governor holding agenda power against a tough assembly, and a weak governor conceding agenda power to a moderate one. Weak governors therefore avoid conflict with the assembly, yet conceal their weakness from the crown. But the assembly observes the governor's concessions, and challenges weak governors even more in the future. This creates a dynamic path of growing assembly power. The model provides a strategic logic of endogenous institutional change, and one of the most important institutional developments in American history: the growth of legislative power.

In the colonial period of American history, the British Crown reviewed, and sometimes nullified, acts of colonial assemblies for "repugnancy to the laws of England." In this way, Crown review established external, legal constraints on American legislatures. I present a formal model to argue that Crown legislative review counteracted political pressure on imperial governors from colonial assemblies, to approve laws contrary to the empire's interests. Optimal review in the model combines both legal and substantive considerations. This gives governors the strongest incentive to avoid royal reprisal by vetoing laws the Crown considered undesirable. Thus, review of legislation for consistency with higher law helped the Crown to grapple with agency problems in imperial governance, and ultimately achieve more (but still incomplete) centralized control over policy. I discuss the legacy of imperial legislative review for early American thinking about constitutional review of legislation by courts.

Separation of powers existed in the British Empire of North America long before the U.S. Constitution of 1789, yet little is known about the strategic foundations of this institutional choice. In this article, I argue that separation of powers helps an imperial crown mitigate an agency problem with its colonial governor. Governors may extract more rents from colonial settlers than the imperial crown prefers. This lowers the Crown's rents and inhibits economic development by settlers. Separation of powers within colonies allows settlers to restrain the governor's rent extraction. If returns to settler investment are moderately high, this restraint is necessary for colonial economic development and ultimately benefits the Crown. Historical evidence from the American colonies and the first British Empire is consistent with the model. This article highlights the role of agency problems as a distinct factor in New World institutional development, and in a sovereign's incentives to create liberal institutions.

I examine a model in which multiple legislative principals monitor a bureaucratic agent's implementation of a project. The principals can each perform oversight of the implementation to limit information asymmetries exploited by the agent. Oversight is costly to perform and due to information leakages between principals, oversight by one principal reveals information to all principals. Thus for some values of the audit costs, there is a collective action problem in monitoring among the principals: the multiplicity of principals can cause the level of this form of oversight to be underperformed relative to the principals' joint interests. Notably, the multiplicity of principals reduces their collective control over the agent even though they have common interests about the agent's actions, i.e. conflicting preference about agent actions are not necessary to attenuate accountability when there are multiple principals. Overall the results point out that the institutional structure of the overseeing body has an important effect on accountability, independent of the institutional structure of the overseen.