Strategic Voting in Sequential Committees

We consider strategic voting with incomplete information and partially common values in sequential committees. A proposal is considered against the status quo in one committee, and only upon its approval advances for consideration in a second committee. Committee members (i) are privately and imperfectly informed about an unobservable state of nature which is relevant to their payoffs, and (ii) have a publicly observable bias with which they evaluate information. We show that the tally of votes in the originating committee can aggregate and transmit relevant information for members of the second committee in equilibrium, provide conditions for the composition and size of committees under which this occurs, and characterize all three classes of voting equilibria with relevant informative voting

Contestable Leaderships: Party Discipline and Vote Buying in Legislatures

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties building on the premise that leaders need to maintain support within the organization to continue leading. Payments distributed by the incumbent on the spot increase the value of promises of future benefits by fostering individuals’ perceived chances that the incumbent will retain her position. The main result of the paper shows, in fact, that the party leader can use promises of future benefits to induce members to vote for a position disliked by the majority of the party only if she also distributes benefits on the spot

Voting in the Bicameral Congress: Large Majorities as a Signal of Quality

We estimate a model of voting in Congress that allows for dispersed information about the quality of proposals in an equilibrium context. The results highlight the effects of bicameralism on policy outcomes. In equilibrium, the Senate imposes an endogenous supermajority rule on members of the House. We estimate this super- majority rule to be about four-fifths on average across policy areas. Moreover, our results indicate that the value of the information dispersed among legislators is significant, and that in equilibrium a large fraction of House members (40-50 %) vote in accordance with their private information. Taken together, our results imply a highly conservative Senate, in the sense that proposals are enacted into law only when it is extremely likely that their quality is high

Judicial lobbying: The politics of labor law constitutional interpretation

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory

The Value of Information in the Court: Get It Right, Keep It Tight

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision making in the US Supreme Court that takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We measure the value of information in the court by the probability that a justice votes differently from how she would have voted without case-specific information. Our results suggest a sizable value of information: in 44 percent of cases, justices' initial leanings are changed by their personal assessments of the case. Our results also confirm the increased politicization of the Supreme Court in the last quarter century. Counterfactual simulations provide implications for institutional design

Judicial Lobbying: The Politics of Labor Law Constitutional Interpretation

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory.

The Value of Information in the Court. Get it Right, Keep it Tight

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision-making in the US Supreme Court which takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We present a measure of the value of information in the court: the probability that a justice votes differently than what she would have voted for in the absence of case-specific information. Our results suggest a sizable value of information: in roughly 44% of cases, justices' initial leanings are changed by their personal assessments of the case. Our results also confirm the increased politicization of the Supreme Court in the last quarter century. We perform counterfactual simulations to draw implications for institutional design