By design, bicameral legislatures often produce tensions between lower chambers, with their direct, localized ties that often link members and constituents, and upper chambers, whose representative capacity is affected by varying sizes of constituencies and electoral mechanisms. With powerful...

We estimate a model of voting in Congress that allows for dispersed information about the quality of proposals in an equilibrium context. In equilibrium, the Senate only approves House bills that receive the support of a supermajority of members of the House. We estimate this endogenous...

This book presents a number of ideas for drawing up new rules to improve the functioning of democracies. The first part examines ways of combining incentive contracts with democratic elections. Such a judicious combination can alleviate a wide range of political failures without impairing the...

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in...

Models of repeated legislative bargaining typically assume that an agenda setter is randomly selected each period, even if the agenda setter in the previous period successfully passed a proposal. In reality, successful legislative agenda setters (e.g., speakers, committee chairs) tend to hold...