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

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

Who wins in Conference Committee?

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Sophisticated Voting with Separable Preferences

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