campaign contributions and congressional voting a simultaneous probit tobit model m any citizens and scholars have been troubled by the influence that special interest groups appear to exert over policymaking as a result of their roles in the financing of political campaigns these concerns inspired the enactment of a number of election law reforms in the 1970s and have led to increasing popular support for public financing of electoral campaigns despite the public attention these issues have attracted few social scientists have attempted to analyze the financial relationships between interest groups and policymakers empirically 1 one such study was reported by durden and silberman 1976 who included contributions from the afl cio political action committee as an independent variable in an equation explaining congressional voting on minimum wage legislation their results indicated that campaign contributions significantly affected voting on that issue the work i have done differs substantially from that of durden and silberman in two ways first i have chosen to examine issues which were of considerably narrower concern than the minimum wage issue in the interest of simplicity i examine issues of concern to just one or a few groups i have also used a different econometric technique if campaign contributions are actually endogenous as seems plausible the single equation estimation technique employed by durden and silberman is subject to a possible simultaneous equations bias for each issue studied i have therefore jointly estimated a two equation system explaining both votes on the bill and contributions from an associated interest group the simultaneous probit tobit model which i use takes into account the dichotomous nature of the variable indicating a congressman s vote the non negativity constraint imposed on the contribution variable and the possibility of correlation between the error terms for the equations explaining these two variables 2 full information maximum likelihood fiml estimates for the model are consistent and asymptotically efficient

time and punishment an intertemporal model of crime if an increase in the rate at which a criminal commits crimes lowers the expected time until detection the income from crime net of expected fines must be discounted at a rate that varies with the crime rate this paper models the criminal s choice of the optimal crime rate under such conditions it is shown that irrespective of the criminal s attitude toward risk an increase in the probability of detection is more likely to deter crime than a comparable increase in penalties other implications of the model for the optimal enforcement of laws are also explored

buying negative agenda control in the u s house we explore the foundations of the legislative party cartel as theorized by cox and mccubbins 1993 2005 to determine how majority party moderates who suffer net policy losses from the majority leadership s use of negative agenda control are kept from defecting from the cartel arrangement first we identify formally the group of majority party members who are net policy losers we find that those members occupying the initial 30 of the space within the majority party blockout zone that space closest to the floor median are hurt on a pure policy basis by the cartel arrangement second we find that members in this 30 zone are rewarded disproportionately by majority party leaders relative to members in other intervals on the same side of the floor median via side payments in the form of campaign contributions in addition majority party members within the 30 zone receive side payments commensurate with their particular policy loss

coalition and party formation in a legislative voting game we examine a legislative voting game where decisions are being made over both ideological and distributive dimensions and legislators preferences are separable over the two dimensions in equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together rather than offering sequential proposals on the two dimensions separately the equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions and in any equilibrium there is a positive probability that a proposal is made and approved which excludes the median legislator as defined over the ideological dimension in contrast with a game where no distributive decision is being made moreover in any stationary equilibrium there is more than one ideological decision that has a positive probability of being proposed and approved we show that legislators can gain from forming political parties and consider examples where predictions can be made about the composition of parties we discuss the impact of political parties on the outcome

a primer on mathematical modelling in economics the commission on graduate education in economics had raised several concerns regarding the role of mathematics in graduate training in economics krueger 1991 colander 1998 2005 this paper undertakes a detailed scrutiny of the notion of a utility function to motivate and describe the common patterns across mathematical concepts and results that are used by economists in the process one arrives at a classification of mathematical terms which is used to state mathematical results in economics the usefulness of the classification scheme is illustrated with the help of a discussion of arrow s impossibility theorem common knowledge of the patterns in mathematical concepts and results could be effective in enhancing communication between students teachers and researchers specializing in different sub fields of economics

endogenous federal grants and crowd out of state government spending theory and evidence from the federal highway aid program contrary to simple theoretical predictions existing evidence suggests that federal grants do not crowd out state government spending a legislative bargaining model with endogenous grants documents a positive correlation between grant receipts and preferences for public goods this correlation has likely biased existing work against measuring crowd out to correct for such endogeneity the model motivates instruments based on the political power of state congressional delegations exploiting this exogenous variation in grants the instrumental variables estimator reports crowd out that is statistically and economically significant this endogeneity may explain the flypaper effect a nonequivalence between grant receipts and private income jel d70 h40 h77

the effect of punishment on firm compliance with hazardous waste regulations abstract this paper examines the effect of epa s dramatic 1991 increase in the penalties associated with violations of hazardous waste regulations on firm compliance although data from epa s rcra information system show an increase in detected violations after the penalty change once inspection levels are incorporated into the analysis through a censored bivariate probit model i find that violations have decreased since the penalty change however the decrease in violations appears small relative to the increase in recommended penalty levels i also find evidence that the likelihoods of inspection and compliance vary significantly across regions

on the efficiency of equilibria in a legislative bargaining model with particularistic and collective goods this study analyzes the efficiency of equilibria in a multilateral bargaining game in which a legislature divides its budget among collective and particularistic goods in order to disentangle the causes of inefficiency we extend the model of volden and wiseman am polit sci rev 101 79 92 2007 by considering quasi linear utility functions and consensus requirements ranging from simple majority to unanimity although unanimous agreements can be reached under weaker consensus requirements we show that pareto inefficiency is associated with non unanimous consent we also study how i the endogenous selection of the legislature s size or ii a sequential choice of collective and particularistic spending eliminates or attenuates the inefficiency problem

bargaining and value we present and analyze a model of noncooperative bargaining among n participants applied to situations describable as games in coalitional form this leads to a unified solution theory for such games that has as special cases the shapley value in the transferable utility tu case the nash bargaining solution in the pure bargaining case and the recently introduced maschler owen consistent value in the general nontransferable utility ntu case moreover we show that any variation in a certain class of our bargaining procedure which generates the shapley value in the tu setup must yield the consistent value in the general ntu setup

bargaining in legislatures 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 power of the proposal maker in a model of endogenous agenda formation in a distributive setting this study examines a voting procedure for which agenda formation is endogenous it is found not surprisingly that agenda formation is another avenue for strategic manipulation of the voting process and provides the member to first take the floor an asymmetric advantage what is surprising is the degree of this advantage we find that the initial proposal maker earns a share of the fixed resource exceeding 1 for an majority rule and this is regardless of the number of members the voting rule is found to be an effective instrument in at least partially offsetting the power of the proposal maker while maintaining the stability of the voting process

senate representation and coalition building in distributive politics p7 vhe senate s equal representation of states shapes coalition building in distributive politics the great variation in state population means that some states have far greater need for federal fttnds than others but all senators have equal voting weight as a result even though all senators votes are of equal value to the coalition builder they are not of equal prwice coalition builders can include benefits for small states at considerably less expense to program budgets than comparable benefits for more populous states building on formal models of coalition building two hypotheses are developed and tested first coalition builders will seek out less costly members to build supportive coalitions efficiently second the final outcomes of distributive policy will more closely reflect the preferences of small state senators than large state senators the hypotheses are tested by examining the 1991 and 1997 98 reauthorizations of federal surface transportation programs the findings support both hypotheses

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

communication in federal politics universalism policy uniformity and the optimal allocation of fiscal authority the paper presents a positive model of policy formation in federal legislatures when delegates engage in the strategic exchange of policy relevant information depending on the type of policy under consideration communication between delegates generally suffers from a bias that makes truthful communication difficult and sometimes impossible this generates inefficient federal policy choices that are often endogenously characterized by overspending universalism and uniformity building on these findings i develop a theory of fiscal de centralization which revisits the work of oates in a world of incomplete information and strategic communication empirical results from a cross section of us municipalities are consistent with the predicted pattern of spending

the marginals never vanished incumbency and competition in elections to the u s house of representatives 1952 82 the average vote margin enjoyed by incumbent candidates for the u s house of representatives increased sharply during the 1 960s despite this and contrary to assumptions common in the literature on recent congressional elections electoral data show that house incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s the marginals properly defined have not vanished the swing ratio has diminished little if at all and competition for house seats held by incumbents has not declined vote margins increased without adding to incumbent security diminishing competition or dampening swings because the heterogeneity of interelection vote swings increased at the same time

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

party government and the cohesive power of public plunder we argue that party government in the u s house of representatives rests on two pillars the pursuit of policy goals and the disbursement of particularistic benefits existing theories of party government argue that the majority party in the house is often successful in biasing policy outcomes in its favor in the process it creates policy losers among its own members who nevertheless support their party on procedural votes we posit that the majority party creates an incentive for even the policy losers to support a procedural coalition through judicious distribution of particularistic benefits that compensates policy losers at a rate commensurate with the policy losses that they suffer we evaluate our theory empirically using the concept of roll rates in conjunction with federal domestic outlays data for the period 1983 96 we find that within the majority party policy losers are favored in the distribution of pork barrel spending throughout this period

building majority coalitions for sub majority benefit distributions this paper poses a deceptively simple question it asks how can a program or group of programs that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts be passed by a majority of a legislative body the answer in the existing body of work on distributive policymaking would suggest that supporters of narrowly focused programs are able to ensure passage of their pet projects by logrolling with other legislators we argue that logrolling is not always necessary to produce majority support for narrowly focused programs the paper considers three institutional mechanisms for building majority support for sub majority benefit distributions political parties interest groups and administrative agencies the conditions that would be required for each mechanism to be employed are outlined descriptive data from the 100th congress are employed to reflect on the relative plausibility of each of the mechanisms with respect to the question of how a program that provides distributive benefits to recipients in a minority of legislative districts can be passed by a majority of a legislative body we reject the first mechanism the party based explanation on the grounds that it is empirically implausible at least in the american case the other two we argue are empirically plausible under certain conditions

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

the industrial organization of congress or why legislatures like firms are not organized as markets this paper provides a theory of legislative institutions that parallels the theory of the firm and the theory of contractual institutions like market institutions legislative institutions reflect two key components the goals or preferences of individuals here representatives seeking reelection and the relevant transactions costs we present three conclusions first we show how the legislative institutions enforce bargains among legislators second we explain why given the peculiar form of bargaining problems found in legislatures specific forms of nonmarket exchange prove superior to market exchange third our approach shows how the committee system limits the types of coalitions that may form on a particular issue

political preferences for the pork barrel a generalization this paper provides a rational explanation for the observation of oversized coalitions often approaching unanimous size in the realm of distributive policies distributive policies are those which concentrate benefits in specific geographic areas states congressional districts while spreading costs through general taxation the explanation offered here that legislators may rationally prefer universalism to hard ball coalition politics generalizes earlier work of weingast and fiorina in particular it extends their results to pork barrel politics i e projects that are economically inefficient and demonstrates how packages of economically inefficient projects can nevertheless be politically popular the main theoretical feature that induces preferences for universalism is uncertainty over the composition of winning coalitions and consequently the desire for the political insurance that universalism provides

distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy the theoretical literature on distributive politics however focuses almost exclusively on a centralized top down view of policy distribution by examining the role of presidents legislators and bureaucrats scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures the recipient jurisdictions this analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time the analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions states or congressional districts

judgment aggregation in search for the truth we analyze the problem of aggregating judgments over multiple issues from the perspective of whether aggregate judgments manage to efficiently use all voters private information while new in judgment aggregation theory this perspective is familiar in a different body of literature about voting between two alternatives where voters disagreements stem from conflicts of information rather than of interest combining the two bodies of literature we consider a simple judgment aggregation problem and model the private information underlying voters judgments assuming that voters share a preference for true collective judgments we analyze the resulting strategic incentives and determine which voting rules efficiently use all private information we find that in certain but not all cases a quota rule should be used which decides on each issue according to whether the proportion of yes votes exceeds a particular quota

political and economic influences on the bureaucratic allocation of federal funds the case of urban development action grants abstract the distributive theory of politics predicts that federal budget allocations will be responsive to the committee position of congressmen and their majority minority party status but such political allocations are less likely where bureaucrats rather than legislators make the allocative decisions in such cases we must take into account bureaucratic motivations as well niskanen s bureaucratic budget maximization theory emphasizes such bureaucratic maximands and the efficient production of output or activity by the budget constrained bureau in this paper the two theories are tested using data from the urban development action grant program a capital subsidy program operated by the department of housing and urban development a set of political and bureaucratic decision criteria is employed as independent variables in a series of logit and tobit models in order to predict the likelihood of projects being funded and the amounts they will receive the political criteria are not significant in any specifications but the bureaucratic criteria suggest an investment maximizing risk avoidance strategy on the part of hud bureaucrats thus the results support the niskanen theory but do not support the distributive theory

the effects of congressional appropriation committee membership on the distribution of federal research funding to universities i introduction in 1994 members of the republican party pledged to seek legislation to impose term limits on members of congress this pledge stemmed from the popular belief that senior members of congress tend to promote personal interests or are more influenced by lobbying efforts that may not be representative of their constituents today term limits continue to be discussed but have not been enacted instead many members have focused their energies toward minimizing the time spent on any particular committee of congress believing that tenure on a committee is a more serious concern than simple tenure in congress implicit in these concerns is the issue whether as incumbent politicians plan to retire they will behave differently and if so whether tenure on a congressional committee exacerbates this behavior this article explores the role of membership on the appropriations committee on the distribution of federal research funding to universities specifically it explores whether funding is diverted to these universities because politicians use their position on a committee to promote personal or constituent interests previous research on shirking compares the voting records of politicians on certain issues with demographic and economic characteristics of the politicians constituents this article explores the issue of shirking differently i explore how membership on congressional appropriations committees affects the distribution of federal research funding to universities i look at two types of relationships between the members and the universities first i consider the relationship between members and the universities that are located in the members districts states in the case of senators second i examine the relationship between members and their undergraduate alma mater i use district representa tion to proxy favoritism that reflects a politician s constituents given that in most instances an alma mater affiliation is not the same as district representation i use alma mater affiliation to proxy favoritism that reflects the politician s personal interests federal research funding accounts for more than 60 of research funding received by research universities previous research has shown a positive impact of federal funding on research outcomes see adams and griliches 1998 arora and gambardella 1997 connolly 1997 payne and siow 2002 and payne 2001 except for payne and siow 2002 however these articles do not consider that political diversion of funds may promote or detract from research productivity as with any other federal program this article concentrates on the impact of membership on the house and senate appropriations committees because they wield the greatest power in the allocation of funding 1 using a panel data set spanning 26 years i explore how changes in the composition of the appropriations committees affects the distribution of research funding after controlling for the heterogeneity that exists across different universities the results suggest that both district representation and alma mater affiliation matter thus there is evidence of shirking for personal interests and evidence of members representing their constituents with respect to the representation of one s constituents the strongest results suggest that public universities benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees private universities however only benefit from representation in the senate with respect to alma mater affiliations the results suggest again that public universities benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees private universities also benefit from representation on both the senate and house committees the results also suggest that the tenure of the member on the committee matters as does whether the member is a part of the majority party in power in the congressional chamber

aggregation of binary evaluations with abstentions abstract a general model of aggregation of binary evaluations over interrelated issues introduced by wilson and further studied by rubinstein and fishburn and by the authors is extended here to allow for abstentions on some of the issues it is shown that the same structural conditions on the set of feasible evaluations that lead to dictatorship in the model without abstentions lead to oligarchy in the presence of abstentions arrow s impossibility theorem for social welfare functions gibbard s oligarchy theorem for quasi transitive social decision functions as well as some apparently new theorems on preference aggregation are obtained as corollaries

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

the president and the distribution of federal spending scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of congress paying particular attention to committees and majority parties this article highlights the president who has extensive opportunities both ex ante and ex post to influence the distribution of federal outlays we analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24 year period the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled using district and county fixed effects estimation strategies we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays we find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president s party represent them

pacs and the congressional supermarket the currency is complex although pacs attempt to influence the legislative process with contributions this research finds little evidence that the contributions of 120 pacs affiliated with 10 organizations affected the voting patterns of the house members who served continuously from 1975 to 1982 in the few cases in which a relationship between contributions and a member s votes is established the analysis indicates that contributions are a surrogate measure of a more important and larger package of support for the member from the interest groups two stage least squares regression models are used to test the relationship between pac contributions and a member s votes controlling for the incumbent s ideology and party and the political leaning of the district interviews with pac officials supplement the statistical analysis

bringing home the bacon an empirical analysis of the extent and effects of pork barreling in australian politics which electorates receive targeted funding and does targeted funding swing votes to answer these questions i analyze four discretionary programs funded by the australian federal government during the 2001 2004 election cycle controlling for relevant demographic characteristics of the electorate those electorates held by the governing coalition received a larger share of discretionary funding and a larger number of program grants among government seats funding does not appear to have been directed towards those that were more marginal more discretionary funding particularly on road building was associated with a larger swing towards the government in the 2004 election

fiscal consistency and federal district spending in congressional elections theory conventional wisdom holds that legislators win votes by acquiring federal spending for constituents scholars have struggled however to support this belief empirically this paper links federal district spending and pork with an explanation based on consistency electoral performance hinges on legislators fiscal consistency i e whether their votes on federal spending are consistent with their credit claiming for pork flowing to their districts hypotheses in districts receiving substantial pork fiscally liberal incumbents perform better electorally than fiscal conservatives in low pork districts fiscal conservatives perform better methods these hypotheses are tested using aggregate level data from the 198490 united states house elections and individual level data from the 1988 senate election study results the hypotheses are supported on the aggregate and individual levels fiscally consistent legislators receive more votes than fiscally inconsistent legislators

determination of optimal penalties for antitrust violations in a dynamic setting we analyze a differential game describing the interactions between a firm that might be violating competition law and the antitrust authority the objective of the authority is to minimize social costs loss in consumer surplus induced by an increase in prices above marginal costs it turns out that the penalty schemes which are used now in eu and us legislation appear not to be as efficient as desired from the point of view of minimization of consumer loss from price fixing activities of the firm in particular we prove that full compliance behavior is not sustainable as a nash equilibrium in markovian strategies over the whole planning period and moreover that it will never arise as the long run steady state equilibrium of the model we also investigate the question which penalty system enables us to completely deter cartel formation in a dynamic setting we found that this socially desirable outcome can be achieved in case the penalty is an increasing function of the degree of offence and is negatively related to the probability of law enforcement

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics 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

political influence in the distribution of agricultural disaster payments this paper examines the impact of committee membership and electoral votes on the distribution of ad hoc agricultural disaster payments across u s counties our results show that both house oversi

judgment aggregation im possibility theorems the aggregation of individual judgments over interrelated propositions is a newly arising field of social choice theory i introduce several independence conditions on judgment aggregation rules each of which protects against a specific type of manipulation by agenda setters or voters i derive impossibility theorems whereby these independence conditions are incompatible with certain minimal requirements unlike earlier impossibility results the main result here holds for any non trivial agenda however independence conditions arguably undermine the logical structure of judgment aggregation i therefore suggest restricting independence to premises which leads to a generalised premise based procedure this procedure is proven to be possible if the premises are logically independent

determinants of the distribution of congressional earmarks across states abstract this paper examines pork barrel spending within states and finds that per capita earmarked funding is correlated with the inverse of a state s population the presence of a republican congressional delegation and the tenure of a state s senior senator

dynamic estimation of ideal points for the us congress theories of candidate positioning suggest that candidates will respond dynamically to their electoral environment because of the difficulty of obtaining bridge votes most existing approaches for estimating the ideal points of members of congress generate static ideal points or ideal points that move linearly over time we propose an approach for dynamic ideal point estimation using project vote smart s national political awareness test to construct bridge votes we use our dynamic estimates to measure aggregate change to measure individual level change and to study the institutional and structural factors that explain the changing positions of house candidates and members of congress we demonstrate that while the republican party has been selecting increasingly extreme candidates democratic incumbents have become more extreme while in office we also find that the congruence between elected members of congress and their constituents is mostly explained by the selection as opposed to the responsiveness of the candidate nonetheless we find evidence of dynamic responsiveness of incumbents in specific circumstances we find that competitiveness midterm elections and sharing the president s party affiliation are associated with greater responsiveness conversely retirement is not associated with a change in responsiveness we find no evidence of responsiveness of challengers finally we find that close elections draw challengers who are more in line with the district s ideology

macroeconomic conditions and committee re election rates the traditional literature on the link between the macro economy and house elections follows kramer 1971 and assumes all members of the president s party are equally vulnerable to voter wrath caused by economic changes using presidential party return rates from 10 house committees over the time period 1916 1996 i find the impact of economic conditions at the polls varies by committee generally committees that manage money or provide a public good are the most sensitive to economic fluctuations contrastingly members of the public works committee and the rules committee are more insulated from electoral culpability due to economic fluctuations

how to make the fine fit the corporate crime an analysis of static and dynamic optimal punishment theories abstract this paper investigates dynamic optimal punishment theory previous studies of optimal punishment theory have all been confined to a static setup the most celebrated result in the literature is becker s 1968 optimal punishment theory which states that the optimal fine should be a multiple of the social cost of the crime i show that this result is no longer valid in a dynamic environment the implications of the dynamic model of optimal punishment are found to be strikingly different from those of the static model

legislative term limits and state spending supporters of legislative term limits often claim that they will lower state spending levels using fiscal data from 48 states from 1977 to 2001 this paper finds little support for this assertion instead this analysis finds that states with term limits have higher spending levels than states without term limits these results suggest that term limits give legislators greater incentives to deviate from socially optimal fiscal policy by altering the legislative environment in which such policy is formulated

electoral goals and center state transfers a theoretical model and empirical evidence from india we construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations these considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not a testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers we test this prediction using indian data for 14 states from 1974 75 to 1996 97 we find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16 higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non swing

giving the people what they want the distribution of earmarks in the u s house of representatives the common wisdom in journalistic accounts of earmarking is that congress distributes earmarks on a purely political basis without any consideration for the demand for federal spending academic accounts similarly argue that factors internal to congress are preeminent in determining where earmarks go even more than for other types of pork barrel spending using earmarks appearing in the fiscal year 2008 appropriations bills i search for both chamber based and demand side determinants of the distribution of earmarks i find that both types of factors are significantly related to the number of earmarks that a house member receives this result indicates that even while earmarking members of congress are at least minimally responsive to voter preferences and calls into question whether earmarks should be treated as an outlier within the universe of spending allocation mechanisms

endogenous parties in an assembly in this article i show how members of an assembly form voting blocs strategically to coordinate their votes and affect the policy outcome chosen by the assembly in a repeated voting game permanent voting blocs form in equilibrium these permanent voting blocs act as endogenous political parties that exercise party discipline in a stylized assembly i prove that the equilibrium parties must be two small polarized voting blocs one at each side of the ideological divide

congressional committees and the political economy of federal outlays the literature on the organization of the united states congress has been dominated by distributive and informational theory one important source of disagreement between these two theories is their characterization of whether individual legislators can engage in pork barrel activities here we provide evidence which indicates that the pork barrel is alive and well in the contemporary united states congress we focus on whether members of power and constituency committees can direct disproportionate federal expenditures to their districts finding strong and systematic evidence of pork barrel activities by committee members provides empirical support for distributive theories of legislative organization

the committee assignment process and the conditional nature of committee bias the view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure more recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare we reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers we argue that the most widely available and frequently used data floor roll call votes are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form finally we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization the appearance of policy relevant biases in congressional work groups we conclude is not so much rare as it is conditional and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build

on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 on measuring partisanship in roll call voting the u s house of representatives 1877 1999 we propose a method of assessing party influence based on a spatial model our method provides the first test of whether observed values of the widely used rice index of party dissimilarity are consistent with a partyless null model it also avoids problems that beset previous estimators substantively we find evidence of party influence in all but one congress since 1877 moreover our indicator of party pressure is systematically higher for the sorts of roll calls that party theorists believe are more pressured procedural organizational and label defining votes our results refute the widespread notion that parties in the house have typically had negligible influence on roll call voting behavior they also document important changes in party influence associated with the packing of the rules committee in 1961 and the procedural reforms of 1973

a noncooperative theory of legislative coalitions this noncooperative theory is based on a model that incorporates an institutional structure that reflects the sequential process of agenda formation and voting in a legislature that has the task of allocating particularistic benefits among legislative districts the theory is intended to identify the incentives for the formation of proposal coordinating coalitions as a function of characteristics of the political system and the rules that govern agenda formation coalition proposals allocate all the benefits to their districts and whenever the coalition has discipline or controls the chair it will be of minimal winning size when proposals are governed by a closed rule when coalition discipline is absent and the chair is neutral the coalition will be comprised of approximately 70 of the legislature a legislative rule that allows amendments may result in larger coalitions coalition composition is also considered

the stability of hedonic coalition structures we consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings i e where each player s payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition we first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings we then focus on a weaker stability condition individual stability where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition we show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single peaked preferences or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences then there exists an individually stable coalition partition examples show that without these conditions individually stable coalition partitions may not exist we also discuss some other stability concepts and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 a14 d20

the optimal use of fines and imprisonment abstract this paper examines the use of fines and imprisonment to deter individuals from engaging in harmful activities these sanctions are analyzed separately as well as together first for identical risk neutral individuals and then for two groups of risk neutral individuals who differ by wealth when fines are used alone and individuals are identical the optimal fine and probability of apprehension are such that there is some underdeterrence if individuals differ by wealth then the optimal fine for the high wealth group exceeds the fine for the low wealth group when imprisonment is used alone and individuals are identical the optimal imprisonment term and probability may be such that there is either underdeterrence or overdeterrence if individuals differ by wealth the optimal imprisonment term for the high wealth group may be longer or shorter than the term for the low wealth group when fines and imprisonment are used together it is desirable to use the fine to its maximum feasible extent before possibly supplementing it with an imprisonment term the effects of risk aversion of these results are also discussed

dynamic deterrence theory economic theories of deterrence have primarily been built on static models a common and serious shortcoming of the existing dynamic deterrence models is the assumption of a twoperiod structure that ignores recidivism the aims of this paper are to formulate and solve a general dynamic deterrence model that incorporates recidivistic behaviour to explore its implications and to derive some testable predictions the analysis shows how the value and the intensity of engaging in illegal activity change over time highlights the weaknesses of twoperiod deterrence models and compares the deterrent effectiveness of increasing the likelihood of punishment versus the severity of punishment finally the recidivistic model provides a structural foundation for the widely used stochastic process models of crime in operations research and criminology

estrutura politica como determinante dos gastos federais this paper analyses federal expending distribution between brazilian states the hypothesis is that there are variables other than social and geographic ones that explain federal expending decisions country s political structure is also important to determine these choices positive theories of budget allocation such as congressional partisan and electoral are used to ascertain the role performed by political arrangements on the allocation of federal budget a set of political and electoral variables was used to test the importance of these theories the test of the hypothesis utilized a panel data of 27 brazilian states from 1999 to 2003 and the dependent variables used were states voluntary federal transferences and federal investment on states the results confirm the hypothesis indicating that representatives party alignment and voter s behavior on past elections influence resources distribution among states

the advantageous nature of risk aversion in a three player bargaining game where acceptance of a proposal requires a simple majority abstract in a three player bargaining game in which acceptance of a proposed allocation requires only the approval of a simple majority it is shown that the most least risk averse player receives the highest lowest expected share when the preferences of the players are not too diverse

the political economy of the essential air service program we find that congressional influences affect the amount of airport subsidies that a congressional district receives through the essential air service eas program the eas program was passed with the goal of helping to continue commercial air service to rural communities following deregulation in the 1970s using data from 1998 2014 we find strong and consistent evidence that subsidies are higher in districts having congressional representation on the house transportation and ways and means committees our empirical results when combined with news reports of members claiming credit for securing eas funding are consistent with the eas serving private and public interests

the price of pork the seniority trap in the u s house abstract using data on federal outlays and u s house elections i estimate the effect of the pork barrel on the quality of officeholders taking into account the fact that seniority creates a dynamic linkage across periods after estimating the parameters governing the influence of seniority on federal outlays and the parameters governing the distributions of candidate quality i conduct several policy experiments to uncover the size of the welfare loss created by the seniority system i find that the seniority system negatively impacts the quality of representatives but has little effect on the outcomes of elections furthermore the most commonly proposed solution to the distortion term limits may have a significant negative effect on the quality of sitting representatives instead of a quantity constraint term limits i propose a change in the relative price of seniority by way of a pigouvian tax on seniority such a policy achieves the first best outcome

the impact of federal spending on house election outcomes while it is widely believed by academics politicians and the popular press that incumbent members of congress are rewarded by the electorate for bringing federal dollars to their district the empirical evidence supporting that claim is extremely weak one explanation for the failure to uncover the expected relationship between federal spending and election outcomes is that incumbents who expect to have difficulty being reelected are likely to exert greater effort in obtaining federal outlays since it is generally impossible to adequately measure this effort the estimated impact of spending is biased downward because of an omitted variable bias we address this estimation problem using instrumental variables for each house district we use spending outside the district but inside the state containing the district as an instrument for spending in the district federal spending is affected by a large number of actors e g governors senators mayors and other house members in the state delegation