Motivated by polar extremes of monopartisanship and nonpartisanship in existing literature on parties in legislatures, we introduce and analyze a more moderate theory of competitive partisan lawmaking. The distinguishing feature of competitive partisanship is that the minority party, although...

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...

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...

On grounds of inclusion of undesirable votes (type I errors) and exclusion of desirable votes (type II errors), we question the convention of selecting only finalpassage votes for roll call analysis. We propose an alternative selection method based on the estimated salience and strategic...

Synder and Groseclose (2000) develop and apply an innovative method for detecting and estimating the frequency and magnitude of party influence in congressional roll call voting. This paper presents a framework for assessing to coefficient that the authors interpret as "party influence." The...

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)...