Suchergebnisse

We analyze informational lobbying in the context of multi-member legislatures. We show that a single decision maker and a decentralized majoritarian legis- lature provide widely di .erent incentives for interest groups to acquire and transmit policy relevant information. The paper also shows a di .erence in the opportunity to a .ect policy through lobbying between a parliamentary legislature and a legislature with low voting cohesion,such as the U.S.Congress.We show that the incentives to lobby a parliamentary legislature are much lower than to lobby Congress.The results provide a rationale for why lobby groups are more active n the U.S.Congress. The key institutional feature to explain the di .erent behavior of lobby groups is the vote of con .dence procedure,which creates voting cohesion in a parlia- mentary system across policy issues.We show that the .exibility of creating majorities in the Congress creates an incentive for interest groups to play an active role in the design of policy in the congressional system,while the voting cohesion in the parliamentary system dissuades interest group 's incentive to engage in information provision.

Suggests that the 7 legislatures under scrutiny will continue to display the resilience that has marked them out in recent years. However, nothing is certain. For legislatures of Western Europe, the best way to maintain their policy affect and their support is for them to assume that they will not. (SJK)

Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.

We construct a stochastic model of a legislature with an endogenously determined seniority system. We model the behavior of the legislators as well as their constituents as an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game. The game has a stationary equilibrium with the property that the legislature imposes on itself a non-trivial seniority system, and that incumbent legislators are always reelected.

Graphic presentation of a survey regarding State Representation in Legislatures. Data representations include graphs, charts, tables and maps.

In Summer 2003, the Institute of Public Policy conducted a mail survey of state legislators to determine how legislators feel about constituency service and the use of technology, whether they believe email has a positive effect on communication, whom they contact via email and the impact of the internet on the legislature. The states that were surveyed were chosen based on a number of legislative features including multimember districts (MMDs) versus single member districts (SMDs) and term limits. Arizona, New Jersey, North Dakota, and South Dakota are all MMDs for the lower level chambers and single member district SMDs for the upper level chamber while Colorado, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are entirely SMDs. Of these states, Arizona, South Dakota, Colorado and Missouri currently have term limits in place.

This paper is an experiment in what John Rawls recently called "Kantian constructiivism". It seeks to establish a "suitable connection between a particular conception of the person and first principles of [morality] by means of a procedure of construction. Yet, it differs from Rawls' similar efforts in a number of ways. The emphasis is morality generally, not justice in particular. The construction attempts to be more "realistic" especially in substituting external procedures for Rawls' "veil of ignorance". These differences are, I hope, at least suggested by substituting "the moral legislature" for Rawls' "original position". Section I of this paper explains further what motivates the sort of construction proposed, sections II-V describe the moral legislature itself, explaining as well why it makes sense to construct it as I do and how it differs from some obvious alternatives. Section VI concludes with an example of how the moral legislature might be used, the sketch of an argument for the claim that positive law cannot in in generally be morally obliging.

Fallstudie über die Tätigkeit des Parlaments im Bundesstaat Imo unter der Verfassung der Zweiten Republik zwischen 1979 und 1983. Parteipolitische und berufliche Zusammensetzung des Parlaments sowie Führungsstruktur und Machtbefugnisse werden dargestellt, ebenso die eingebrachten Gesetze, Probleme der Kontrolle der Exekutive und der Haushaltsposten. Frage nach dem Verhältnis des Parlaments zu den Bedürfnissen der Wähler. (DÜI-Wsl)