Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...

In this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. Our analysis accounts for the following observed phenomena: (1) Cabinet reshuffles; (2) Cabinet replacements; (3) Early elections; (4) Surplus governments; (5) Minority governments;...

This paper presents a dynamic model of election, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period. The electorate votes strategically by taking into account the...

We present a dynamic model of legislative bargaining in which policy making proceeds until the proposer has no more incentive to make a new proposal to replace the previously approved policy. We characterize stationary Markov perfect equilibria for the game and show that in all pure-strategy...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

This paper compares the incentives to create obstructive committee systems under different constitutionally specified requirements for passing legislation. The Shapley value is used to measure the distribution of bargaining power in the legislature. If the legislature is bicameral or the...

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance in internal organization across legislatures which...

This paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems that incorporates electoral, government formation, and legislative institutions and focuses on the strategic opportunities inherent in those institutions. The electoral system is proportional representation, and a party is selected as...

While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear...