Legislature

About: Legislature is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 16557 publications have been published within this topic receiving 290672 citations. The topic is also known as: organs of power.

New tools in comparative political economy : the database of political institutions

Abstract: This article introduces a large new cross-country database, the database of political institutions. It covers 177 countries over 21 years, 1975-95. The article presents the intuition, construction, and definitions of the different variables. Among the novel variables introduced are several measures of checks and balances, tenure and stability, identification of party affiliation with government or opposition, and fragmentation of opposition and government parties in the legislature.

Protecting soldiers and mothers : the political origins of social policy in the United States

Abstract: It is generally believed that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled and dependent citizens. During the late 19th century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the U.S. nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than 40 states enacted social spending, labour regulations, and health education programmes to assist American mothers and children. As Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House

Abstract: 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.

Bargaining in Legislatures

Abstract: Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.

The Political Economy of Benefits and Costs: A Neoclassical Approach to Distributive Politics

Abstract: This essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions. The model emphasizes the (economically arbitrary, from a welfare point of view) importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation. We explore the implications of a legislator's objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale.