This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel.' These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership. Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work. This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.

Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House

This paper models balanced-budget redistribution between socio-economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties. Equilibrium is unique in the present model, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough ‘stochastic heterogeneity’ with respect to party preferences in the electorate. The validity of Hotelling's ‘principle of minimum differentiation’, and of ‘Director's Law’, are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions, and voter's possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties. The policy strategy of expected-plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality. Incomes are fixed and known, so lump-sum taxation is feasible. However, constraints on tax/transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis.

http://lib.cufe.edu.cn/upload_files/other/4_20140526043526_22_balanced-budget%20redistribution%20as%20the%20outcome%20of%20political%20competition.pdf

Balanced-budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition

Introduction Part I. Policy and Party Competition 1. Policy dimensions and political preferences 2. "Policy spaces" and models of party competition Part II. Measuring Policy Positions 3. The expert surveys as a measurement tool 4. Measurement issues: bias and error correction in expert survey results 5. The Dimensionality of policy spaces 6. Comparing patterns of party competition Part III. Data Appendices References Index

/pdf/party-policy-in-modern-democracies-57oebqkphf.pdf

Party Policy in Modern Democracies

The authors develop a model of electoral competition in which citizens choose whether or not to run as candidates. A winner implements her favorite policy. The equilibrium number of candidates depends negatively on the cost of running and positively on the benefits of winning. For some parameter values, all equilibria under plurality rule have exactly two candidates, whose positions are distinct. Two-candidate elections are more likely under plurality rule than under a runoff system. The candidates' positions are less differentiated under a runoff system. There exist equilibria under both systems in which some candidates have no chance of winning.

/pdf/a-model-of-political-competition-with-citizen-candidates-51lc73c25d.pdf

A Model of Political Competition with Citizen-Candidates

1. Equilibrium party hegemony 2. Structural determinants of mass support 3. Budget cycles under autocracy 4. The politics of vote-buying 5. Judging economic performance in hard times 6. Ideological divisions in the opposition camp 7. How voters choose and mass coordination dilemmas 8. Electoral fraud and the game of electoral transitions 9. Conclusion.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/cpworkshop/papers/Magaloni.pdf

Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico

Preface 1. Spatial voting models: the behavioural assumptions 2. The unidimensional spatial voting model 3. A two-dimensional spatial model 4. A general spatial model of candidate competition 5. The influence of candidate characteristics and abstention on election outcomes 6. Voting on budgets 7. Models of voter uncertainty 8. Institutions 9. Empirical testing of the spatial theory of elections 10. Concluding observations References Answers to selected problems Index.

The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction

This book provides an introduction to an important approach to the study of voting and elections: the spatial theory of voting. In contrast to the social-psychological approach to studying voting behaviour, the spatial theory of voting is premised on the idea of self-interested choice. Voters cast votes on the basis of their evaluation of the candidates or policy alternatives competing for their vote. Candidates fashion their appeals to the voters in an effort to win votes. The spatial theory provides explicit definitions for these behavioural assumptions to determines the form that self-interested behaviour will take. The consequences of this behaviour for the type of candidate or policy that voters will select is the major focus of the theory. There is a twofold purpose to this work. The first is to provide an elementary but rigourous introduction to an important body of political science research. The second is to design and test a spatial theory of elections that provides insights into the nature of election contests. The book will appeal to a wide audience, since the mathematics is kept to an accessible level.

The spatial theory of voting

Foreword 1. Introduction James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich 2. Multiparty competition, entry, and entry deterrence in spatial models of elections Kenneth A. Shepsle and Ronald N. Cohen 3. Heresthetic and rhetoric in the spatial model William H. Riker 4. Spatial strategies when candidates have policy preferences Donald Wittman 5. A decade of experimental research on spatial models of elections and committees Richard D. McKelvey and Peter C. Ordeshook 6. Candidate uncertainty and electoral equilibria Peter J. Coughlin 7. The theory of predictive mappings James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich 8. Multicandidate spatial competition Gary W. Cox 9. The setter model Howard Rosenthal Author index Subject index.

Advances in the spatial theory of voting

BASIC TO MODELS of electoral competition is the assumption that candidates adopt positions on policy issues as a means of attracting votes. However, candidates are also judged on the basis of human qualities and other attributes not related to the policies they espouse in a campaign. The spatial theory of electoral competition has, in the past, treated such attributes as part of the policy space over which candidates compete. However, certain difficulties attend such an interpretation. For example, it is difficult to view a candidate's personality as something which can be altered to please the voters. The mistakes that an incumbent has committed in office are not things he can erase to compete more effectively for votes. A candidate's religion cannot be abandoned because it is a political liability. In short, there are nonspatial attributes that affect voter evaluations of each candidate, which are beyond that candidate's immediate control. It is the purpose of this paper to incorporate these nonspatial attributes into the spatial model of electoral competition to show how the policy outcome of two candidate electoral competition is af-

Nonspatial Candidate Characteristics and Electoral Competition

A new model of voter uncertainty about candidate positions is presented in which voters simplify the issue positions of the candidate by representing them as a random variable on an underlying evaluative dimension. It is further assumed that the degree of voter uncertainty depends upon the mean location of this random variable. It is demonstrated that this type of spatially dependent uncertainty results in a shift of each voter's ideal point on the underlying dimension. We discuss two types of shifts, one in which voter ideal points are shifted toward the extremes and the other in which they are shifted toward the center and comment on the consequences of these shifts for two-candidate electoral competition. Finally, we relate our model to earlier work on the subject by Downs (1957) and Shepsle (1972).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2110815.pdf

James M. Enelow

Papers

The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction

The spatial theory of voting

Advances in the spatial theory of voting

Nonspatial Candidate Characteristics and Electoral Competition

A New Approach to Voter Uncertainty in the Downsian Spatial Model