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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.

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.