One way in which parties in the U.S. House of Representatives might affect legislative outcomes is if they pressure some of their members into voting the party line, when those members would prefer not to. How well do traditional measures of party voting, such as the Rice index of party...

Green and Shapiro have argued that rational choice theory has produced virtually no new propositions about politics that have been carefully tested and not found wanting; and that an empirically successful rational choice theory would be no more universal than the middle-level theories that they...

Douglass North and Barry Weingast's seminal account of the Glorious Revolution argued that specific constitutional reforms enhanced the credibility of the English Crown, leading to much stronger public finances. Critics have argued that the most important reforms occurred incrementally before...