Executive-legislative deadlock is perceived as the Achilles’ heel of presidential democracy, because its occurrence has been associated with democratic breakdown in Latin America. Given the centrality of deadlock in the literature, I propose a simple spatial model of executive-legislative...

A key premise of partisan theories of congressional organization is that majority status confers substantial procedural advantages. In a recent paper (Cox and Magar 1999), we took advantage of the Republicans’ historic victory in the midterm elections of 1994 to assess the value of majority...

This paper describes the main features of the Mexican fiscal system, details the most important changes that have occurred/not occurred over the past two decades, and explains what factors influenced the rate, degree and direction of change. In brief, we contend that there have been profound and...

We investigate the dimensionality of Mexico's Supreme Court by analyzing individual justice behavior in judicial review petitions heard between 1995 and 2007. We specify a dynamic, two-dimensional item response model to estimate ideal points and their temporal drift from all contested votes...

Redistricting affects directly the translation of votes to seats, and is therefore one of the most politicized procedures within electoral management. Mexico’s approach is unique – since 1996 an independent board has been creating plans algorithmically. Parties, however, are able to...

We consider the behavior of an incumbent that can deploy local public goods and private goods to buy votes, and is unable to verify vote choice but capable of monitoring voter turnout, a common scenario in secret-ballot polities. As advanced by recent literature, the ability to monitor turnout...

Using multicointegration methodology, we develop criteria for testing sustainability of fiscal budgeting processes across all states of nature. Criteria are derived from the optimal control literature where levels and rates of change of a system of variables are determinants of policy response....

In Leachman et al. (2005) we use the multicointegration approach to test for sustainable fiscal budgeting processes in a stochastic setting in 15 industrialized countries. In this paper, we extend the analysis in order to rank these same countries as well as an additional three, according to the...