Endogenous Limits on Proposal Power

We present a dynamic model of legislative bargaining in which policy making proceeds until the proposer has no more incentive to make a new proposal to replace the previously approved policy. We characterize stationary Markov perfect equilibria for the game and show that in all pure-strategy equilibria, a majority of voters without proposal power have an incentive to protect each others' benefits to secure their own long-term bargaining positions in the legislature. As a consequence, the value of proposal power is constrained.Parliamentary democracy, proportional representation, government formation, policy dynamics, lack of commitment, inefficiency.

A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The main goal of the paper is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. To achieve this goal we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and we estimate this model using a newly collected data set. Given estimates of the structural model, we assess reelection probabilities for members of Congress, estimate the effect of congressional experience on private and public sector wages, and quantify the value of a congressional seat. Moreover, we use the estimated model to assess how an increase in the congressional wage or the imposition of term limits would affect the career decisions of politicians and the returns to a career in Congress.Political careers, politicians, elections, term limits

The Effects of Constitutions on Coalition Governments in Parliamentary Democracies

In this article we present an overview of our recent research on the effects of constitutions on coalition governments in parliamentary democracies. Our approach is based on the solution and estimation of a multilateral bargaining model which we use to investigate the consequences of constitutional features of parliamentary democracy for the formation and stability of coalition governments.Political Stability, Coalition Governments, Constitutional Design

A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers: Supplementary Materiel

This paper contains additional details about the model in our paper “A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers” (Diermeier, Keane and Merlo (2004)), as well as the computational methods we use to solve and estimate the model, and the construction of the data set.Political careers, politicians, elections, term limits

Bicameralism and Government Formation

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary democracy on the formation and stability of coalition governments. We then apply our methodology to estimate the effects of governmental bicameralism. Our main findings are that eliminating bicameralism does not affect government durability, but does have a significant effect on the composition of governments leading to smaller coalitions. These results are due to an equilibrium replacement effect: removing bicameralism affects the relative durability of coalitions of different sizes which in turn induces changes in the coalitions that are chosen in equilibrium.Political stability, Government formation, Government dissolution, Bicameralism, Comparative constitutional design

of Management, Northwestern University.

Recent theoretical and empirical studies on comparative constitutions have deepened our understanding of how political institutions shape economic policies. Models by Persson and Tabellini (1999), Lizzeri and Persico (2001), and Milesi-Ferretti et al. (2002), for example, compared how different electoral rules lead to different fiscal policie

Government Turnover in Parliamentary Democracies

government stability; minority coalitions; surplus coalitions

Exploring the Characteristics of Opinion Expressions for Political Opinion Classification

Recently there has been increasing interest in constructing general-purpose political opinion classifiers for applications in e-Rulemaking. This problem is generally modeled as a sentiment classification task in a new domain. However, the classification accuracy is not as good as that in other domains such as customer reviews. In this paper, we report the results of a series of experiments designed to explore the characteristics of political opinion expression which might affect the sentiment classification performance. We found that the average sentiment level of Congressional debate is higher than that of neutral news articles, but lower than that of movie reviews. Also unlike the adjectivecentered sentiment expression in movie reviews, the choice of topics, as reflected in nouns, serves as an important mode of political opinion expression. Manual annotation results demonstrate that a significant number of political opinions are expressed in neutral tones. These characteristics suggest that recognizing the sentiment is not enough for political opinion classification. Instead, what seems to be needed is a more finegrained model of individuals\u27 ideological positions and the different ways in which those positions manifest themselves in political discourse