Professor Tullock has raised a central question in the confrontation between abstract models of PMR and majority rule as practiced in real institutions. We believe the decision making stability of real-world legislatures lies in the way these legislatures institutionalize majority rule....

We take a garden-variety instance of distributive politics-- a divide-the-cake stage game -- and explore dynamic extensions in different institutional settings: (i) repeated play of the stage game in a simultaneous-term unicameral legislature; (ii) repeated play in a staggered-term unicameral...

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of...

Models of nomination politics in the US often find "gridlock" in equilibrium because of the super-majority requirement in the Senate for the confirmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present...

This paper provides the theoretical perspective and empirical support for congressional dominance of agency decisions. My thesis is twofold. First, because much of the previous evidence on this question is not evidence at all, many scholars' intuition and conclusions are based on a logically...