This paper presents a dynamic model of election, government formation, and legislation in a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation in which the policy chosen in one period becomes the status quo for the next period. The electorate votes strategically by taking into account the...

Recent empirical studies by Persson and Tabellini show that, in parliamentary countries with proportional representation, government spending as a fraction of GDP goes up during cyclical downturns but does not come down during cyclical upturns, whereas this ratchet effect is not apparent in...

We present a dynamic model of legislative bargaining with an endogenously evolving default policy and a persistent agenda setter. Policy making proceeds until the agenda setter can no longer pass a new policy to replace an approved bill. We prove existence and necessary conditions of...

We present a dynamic model of legislative bargaining in which policy making proceeds until the proposer has no more incentive to make a new proposal to replace the previously approved policy. We characterize stationary Markov perfect equilibria for the game and show that in all pure-strategy...

We generalize the dynamic bargaining game of Diermeier and Fong (2011) to arbitrary quota rules to provide a non-cooperative characterization of the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set. Assuming that players are sufficiently patient and have strict preferences, a pure-strategy stationary...

This paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system, a formateur selected based on party representation in parliament, and parties that cannot commit to the policies they will implement once in government. Government formation involves...