We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

This paper studies the impacts of party discipline on allocation of scarce federal resources among national districts. In particular, I model the distribution of government spending within a two-party legislature as an asymmetric contest game between congress members, in which the majority party...

This paper examines theory and evidence on party competition in the U.S. Congress in the allocation of members to committees. Parties allocate members to committees to maximize the joint utility of its members, taking into account how the committees' memberships affect the legislation adopted by...