Congression scholars regularly idenify Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as the personification of centralized authority and partisan strength in the United States Congress. Portraits of Cannon as a tyrant, however, are almost always based on anecdotal evidence and journalistic accounts. This paper...

Annual changes in domestic discretionary spending are analyzed to test predictions from three distinct types of theories of U.S. policy-making: (1) preference-driven, or nonpartisan, theories such as the recently developed pivotal politics theory or the better-known median voter theory, (2)...

We provide a definition of institutionalism and a schematic account that distinguishes between institutional theories (in which institutions are exogenous) and theories of institutions (in which some, but necessarily not all, institutions are endogenous). Our primary argument is that...

Political parties are active when citizens choose among candidates in elections, and when winning candidates choose among policy alternatives in government. But the inextricably linked institutions, incentives, and behavior that determine these multistage choices are substantively complex and...

A framework is introduced for evaluating static micro-analytic theories in dynamic macro-political settings. Within the framework, two theories of lawmaking are compared. Analytically, the predictions of the theories are remarkably similar- almost to the point of being observationally...

Collective choice bodies throughout the world use a diverse array of codified rules that determine who may exercise procedural rights, and in what order. This paper analyzes several two-stage decision-making models, focusing on one in which the first-moving actor has a unique, unilateral,...

Motivated by the U.S. Congress's motion to recommit with instructions to report forthwith, a simple spatial model is analyzed to clarify the relationship between early-stage agenda-settings rights of a committee and/or the majority party, a late-stage minimum parliamentary right of the majority...

The minority party is rarely featured in empirical research on parties in legislatures, and recent theories of parties in legislatures are rarely neutral and balanced in their treatment of the two parties. This paper makes a case for redressing this imbalance. We identify four characteristics of...

Krishna and Morgan (2001a) propose "amendments" to two of Gilligan and Krehbiel's (1987, 1988) theoretical studies of legislative signaling. The new results for homogeneous committees do not significantly change the empirical expectations of prior works, but the results for heterogeneous...