Suchergebnisse

In a developing legislature, two types of stability are crucial for maintaining institutional viability. The first type of stability identifies legislative proposals that are invulnerable to majority rule voting cycles. The research addressing the implications of majority rule voting cycles has been rich and sustained, allowing scholars to address committee structures of institutionalized legislatures and norms. However, many formal theories of modern legislatures are not readily applicable to less structurally developed legislatures. In this paper, a simple majority rule game is used to illustrate two types of legislative stability: majority rule stability and stability against various obstructionary tactics including outright secession. For a developing legislature to become institutionalized, both types of stability are necessary.

In this article we assess the ability of caucuses to complement and counterbalance the informa tional roles of the committee system. Corroborating earlier work, we find that caucuses are often composed of policy outliers. However, we also find that the caucuses in policy areas with outlying committees typically have memberships made up of outliers from the opposite side of the floor median. Given these findings, we conclude that the caucus system acts to counterbal ance the inherent biases of the committee system by providing the floor with an informational perspective unrepresented within the committee system.

Examines how caucuses, as a rival source of specialized information, augment the institutional structure of Congress by acting as informational counterparts to committees; since 1947.