Person:

Shepsle, Kenneth

This paper develops a theory of optimal institutional structure for staggered-term (overlapping generations) organizations such as legislative bodies. Our model is a simple stochastic game of multi-principal, multi-agent dynamic relationships. Our results emphasize two key features that are determined by legislative founders at the “constitutional moment”. First, they will agree to institute a mechanism that endows (imperfectly informed) legislators with information about the history of play. Second, we provide conditions in which legislative founders will be indifferent to the structure of legislative procedures.

We consider the consequences of the Senate electoral cycle and bicameralism for distributive politics, introducing the concept of contested credit claiming, i.e., that members of a state’s House and Senate delegations must share the credit for appropriations that originate in their chamber with delegation members in the other chamber. Using data that isolate appropriations of each chamber, we test a model of the strategic incentives contested credit claiming creates. Our empirical analysis indicates that the Senate electoral cycle induces a back-loading of benefits to the end of senatorial terms, but that the House blunts this tendency with countercyclical appropriations. Our analysis informs our understanding of appropriations earmarking and points a way forward in studying the larger consequences of bicameral legislatures.

Gordon Tullock, nearly a half century ago, raised questions about Arrow’s Theorem (“a phantom has stalked the classrooms and seminars of economics and political science”). He followed this up by asking, in light of Arrow’s Theorem, “Why so much stability?” In this paper a more nuanced understanding of the operating characteristics of majority rule in institutional settings, anticipated and stimulated by Tullock, is spelled out. A major distinction is made between preference cycles and voting cycles, suggesting why Arrow’s phantom still stalks, but that Tullock’s intuitions are germane as well.

Models of nomination politics in the USA often find ‘gridlock’ in equilibrium because of the supermajority requirement in the Senate for the confirmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present article we explore the possibility that senators can be induced to vote contrary to their nominal (gridlock-producing) preferences through contributions from the president and/or lobbyists, thus breaking the gridlock and confirming the nominee. We model contributions by the president and lobbyists according to whether payment schedules are conditioned on the entire voting profile, the vote of a senator, or the outcome. We analyze several extensions to our baseline approach, including the possibility that lobbyists may find it more productive to offer inducements to the president in order to affect his proposal behavior, rather than trying to induce senators to vote for or against a given nominee.

The U.S. Senate is an undemocratic institution in two respects. First, the filibuster rule allows a minority of Senators to block a final vote on most measures. Second, the Senate’s malapportionment means that a Senate majority often represents a minority of the population. Eliminating the filibuster would address the first problem but would exacerbate the second. Most proposals for addressing the Senate’s malapportionment either do so only indirectly and contingently, or would require unlikely changes to the Constitution or constitutional doctrine. We therefore propose that the Senate replace its current filibuster rule with what we refer to as a “popular-majoritarian cloture rule.” Under this rule, a motion to close debate and proceed to a final vote would carry if but only if supported by a majority coalition of Senators who collectively represent a larger share of the population than those Senators in opposition. This rule, which would be a constitutional exercise of the Senate’s power to set the rules of its proceedings, would make the body more democratic, legitimate, and functional, and would be prefer-able both to the current filibuster rule and to simple majority rule. The democratic illegitimacy and dysfunction of the U.S. Senate as it currently operates justifies the consideration of institutional reforms that might seem, at the moment, both extreme and unlikely. Repairing American governance requires fixing the Senate, and our proposal illustrates one way to democratize the Senate from within.

This paper estimates the effects of initial committee seniority on the career histories of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established by lottery. Randomization ensures that queue positions are uncorrelated in expectation with other legislator characteristics within these groups. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect of seniority on a variety of career outcomes. Lower-ranked committee members areless likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on their initial committee; are more likely to transfer to other committees; and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the jurisdiction of their initial committee. On the other hand, there is little evidence that the seniority randomization has a net effect on reelection outcomes or noncommittee bills passed.

We study a legislative assembly that chooses its agenda protocol endogenously. We generalize McKelvey and Riezman’s (1992) seminal theory on seniority in legislatures, by allowing for a large class of ordinal agenda rules that assign different recognition probability to each legislator. We consider two stages — the selection of agenda rules, and the decision making that transpires under them. We predict that the agenda rules chosen in equilibrium preserve seniority distinctions, disproportionately favor more senior legislators, and generate an incumbency advantage to all legislators.

In this paper we argue that institutional changes to the seniority system have electoral consequences to incumbents. Building on the theory of Conditional Party Government, we argue that the consolidation of power in the hands of party leadership reduces the electoral value of seniority. This reduction occurs because power that was previously in the hands of committee chairs, whose roles are obtained through seniority, is ceded to party leaders. We present empirical evidence supporting this argument. Our findings suggest that the “condition” of Conditional Party Government, i.e. preference homogeneity among the majority party, is only a necessary condition; in order for centralization to occur, party reformers must also overcome the opposition of entrenched senior members. The empirical results suggest that studies of electoral outcomes should include institutional variables in their statistical models, and that studies of legislative institutions should consider electoral consequences when modeling rule changes made by legislators.