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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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

Externalities as Commodities: Comment

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Continuous Social Decision Procedures

Classical social decision procedures are supposed to map lists of preference orderings into binary relations which describe society's "preferences." But when there are infinitely many alternatives the resulting plethora of possible preference orderings make it impossible to differentiate "nearby" preference relations. If the preference information used to make social decisions is imperfect, society may wish to implement a continuous social decision procedure (SDP) so that nearby preference configurations will map into nearby social preference relations. It is shown here that a continuity requirement can severely restrict the admissible behavior of a social decision procedure. Furthermore a characterization of continuous SDPs is presented which facilitates the examination of such procedures and their relation to various voting mechanisms

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