Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties. The model formalizes the tradeoff between resources at the leaders discretion, and the leaders need to maintain a minimum level of support to continue leading. The value of the leaders promises of future benefits is here endogenously determined by the backbenchers beliefs about the extent of support to the leader among other party legislators. Rewards that can be distributed publicly and on the spot are effective tools to coordinate beliefs about the stability of the leader, and thus also increase the value of the leaders promises of future benefits. These spot resources are in fact necessary for the leader to be powerful: without them, the leader can use promises of future benefits to sway members behavior only if a majority of the party agrees (ex ante) with the leaders preferred position in the first place. Adapted from the source document.

We consider a class of dynamic collective action problems in which either a single principal or two competing principals vie for the support of members of a group. We focus on the dynamic problem that emerges when agents negotiate and commit their support to principals sequentially. We show that competition reduces agents' welfare with public goods, or if and only if there are positive externalities on uncommitted agents, and increases agents' welfare with public bads. We apply the model to the study of corporate takeovers, vote buying, and exclusive deals. (JEL D42, D62, D72, D82, G34, H41)

We study the conditions under which members of Congress incorporate policy‐specific considerations in their decisions. To do this, we estimate a model that accounts for the influence of private information about legislation quality on voting patterns in the House and Senate. We find that minority party members are more likely to evaluate proposals on their merits than majority members, but institutional and electoral considerations significantly attenuate these partisan differences. In particular, seniority, electoral safety, and constituents' political knowledge have a balancing effect on partisan predispositions to rely on policy‐relevant information, making minority (majority) members less (more) likely to vote informatively.

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice votes differently from how she would have voted without case-specific information. Our results suggest a sizable value of information: in 44 percent of cases, justices' initial leanings are changed by their personal assessments of the case. Our results also confirm the increased politicization of the Supreme Court in the last quarter century. Counterfactual simulations provide implications for institutional design. (JEL D72, D82, D83, K10)