Suchergebnisse

Legislatures, David C. Docherty, The Canadian Democratic
Audit Series; Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, pp. 224.David Docherty's book, Legislatures, is ambitious both
in terms of its comparative perspective and the territory it reviews. The
book deals with virtually all important aspects of the Canadian Parliament
and provincial legislatures. The main focus, however, is on the House of
Commons.

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.

Mode of access: Internet. ; Prepared by J.A. Beek, secretary of the Senate, 1942-

[p. 3] ; column 4 ; ½ col. in. ; The Utah legislature met in Salt Lake City.

[p. 3] ; column 4 ; 1 col. in. ; The Montana legislature has met to discuss giving bonds to railroads. The Utah Northern railroad is a company they are considering.

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.