Super-Statutes

Not all statutes are created equal. Appropriations laws perform important public functions, but they are usually short-sighted and have little effect on the law beyond the years for which they apportion public monies. Most substantive statutes adopted by Congress and state legislatures reveal little more ambition: they cover narrow subject areas or represent legislative compromises that are short-term fixes to bigger problems and cannot easily be defended as the best policy result that can be achieved. Some statutes reveal ambition but do not penetrate deeply into American norms or institutional practice. Even fewer statutes successfully penetrate public normative and institutional culture in a deep way. These last are what we call super-statutes

The Countermajoritarian Opportunity

Streaming video requires Flash Player, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player to view.Ferejohn will be discussing a paper he wrote with Pasquale Pasquino and recently presented at a conference on Rational Choice and Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. The paper can be found at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/Ferejohn.pdf.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent Web page, streaming video, event photo

Sour Notes on the Theory of Vote Trading

The recent literature on logrolling or vote trading has been quite long on intuitive argument and carefully constructed examples, and short on general theorems. This state of affairs is not too surprising since for all the scholarly attention the subject has recently enjoyed, there is remarkably little agreement on concepts or definitions. As a result most arguments are carried out in an ambiguous setting, and authors appear to arrive at quite different conclusions about the outcomes of vote trading in legislatures. Just to provide some orientation for those who have not plowed through the literature recently, I shall provide a brief review of the literature on the subject

Reconciliation and the Size of the Budget

Reconciliation has become a regular feature of the congressional budget process. We address the question of whether or under what conditions the budget process with reconciliation (modeled as selection of the size of the budget first and its division second) produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually. The theoretical result is that reconciliation sometimes results in relatively large budgets. A testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently reconciliation is to be employed, congressmen will jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under the available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement (usually a rule) that yields the most favorable outcome. Empirical results from the budget process in the House from 1980-83 are generally supportive of the hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements which is derived from the theory

A Comparison of Party Identification in the United States and Great Britain

Political scientists for some time have questioned the value of party identification in the British context. The most popular objection has been that party identification appears to be less stable and less independent from the vote in Great Britain than in the United States. We attempt to demonstrate that the first objection is based on strong assumptions about how to deal with minor party identifiers and independents while the second can be disputed by showing that short-term forces, and not just measurement error, cause party identification and the vote to covary imperfectly. The analysis is carried out with the original Butler and Stokes data

An Impossibility Theorem for Von Neumann-Morgenstern Solutions

Recently two game theoretic interpretations of social choice procedures have been offered. First, Wilson (1970) and Plott, (1974) suggested that, for each environment, the value of a choice function might constitute a “solution” or stable set that could arise from the play of some underlying cooperative game. In this view, and important problem is to determine if and under what conditions a given solution concept (or notion of stability) can, for some game, characterize the behavior of a given social choice function. Secondly, social choice functions have been interpreted as collections of equilibria of an underlying noncooperative game (see Gibbard (1973), Peleg (1978), Maskin (1977), and Ferejohn and Grether (1979). In this framework, one major problem is to determine for a given equilibrium correspondence of a suitably chosen noncooperative game. A closely related problem is to determine which noncooperative games possess nonempty equilibrium correspondences of various sorts. In this paper, we pursue a cooperative game-theoretic interpretation of social choice. And in particular we show that, if a social choice function arises as a Von Neumann Morgenstern solution in each environment, then it is essentially oligarchical in exactly the same sense that “core” selecting choice functions are oligarchic. The conditions under which this conclusion is obtained are, in fact, slightly more restrictive than those for the results on core selecting choice functions but are still weak enough that our result applies to almost any commonly occurring voting scale

Representations of Binary Decision Rules by Generalized Decisiveness Structures

This paper is motivated by two apparently dissimilar deficiencies in the theory of social choice and the theory of cooperative games. Both deficiencies stem from what we regard as an inadequate conception of decisiveness or coalitional power. Our main purpose will be to present a more general concept of decisiveness and to show that this notion allows us to characterize broad classes of games and social choice procedures