In this paper, we study the extent to which social connections influence the legislative effectiveness of members of the U.S. Congress. We propose a new model of legislative effectiveness that formalizes the role of social connections and generates simple testable predictions. The model predicts...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...

State and federal courts routinely cast state legislatures in the role of democratic hero. In the past year alone, some states have warmed to the nondelegation doctrine, striking down governors’ pandemic responses on the idea that the legislature must make such weighty choices. During the 2020...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

The study provides descriptive data on durations, attributes, and parliamentary activities in legislative processes at the level of individual law proposals. It examines all government proposals submitted to the Brazilian Congress between October 1988 and December 2012, tracing their legislative...