While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear...

We analyze two-candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters. Each voter has noisy private information about the state variable. We show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private...

In 1908 the Welsh neurologist and psychoanlayst Ernest Jones described human beings as rationalizers whose behavior is governed by "the necessity of providing an explanation." We construct a formal and testable model of rationalization in which a decision maker selects her preferred alternative...

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...

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...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The...