Can the President or the Senate affect the balance of power in the House? We find that they can. Our answer comes from a model that links House leadership decisions to the constitutional requirement to build lawmaking coalitions with the Senate and President. Changing the ideal point of a...

In a recent edition of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations...

In a recent edition of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as lacking “a moral basis” and as being based on “simple-minded and...

The theory in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action is built from historically uncontroversial assumptions about interpersonal communication. Today, evolving technologies are changing communication dynamics in ways that invalidate some of these once uncontroversial assumptions. How do...

We re–examine whether the broad support for repeal of the estate tax is a result of citizen ignorance. We find that increasing information about the estate tax or politics in general has very different effects on Republicans and Democrats. While high– and low–information Republicans...

While the delegation of policy-making authority from legislators to bureaucrats is ubiquitous in modern democracies, there is considerable disagreement about the consequences of this type of delegation. Some scholars point to the fact that bureaucrats tend to have policy-relevant expertise,...

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about how people think. One such assumption, that political actors use identical conjectures when assessing others’ strategies, is nested within applications of widely-used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. When...

How should judges interpret statutes? Like many others, we begin with the premise that statutory interpretation is a quest by judges to use the best available theory and information to determine “what statutes mean.” When seen in this light, two attributes of statutes merit attention. ·...

Some states treat a same-sex marriage as legally equal to a marriage between a man and a woman. Other states prohibit legal recognition of same-sex marriages in their constitutions. In every state that has a constitutional restriction against same-sex marriage, the amendment was passed by a...

The stock index “point” is a focal component of financial news reports. Though many reports draw attention to point changes in major indices, few people realize that the value of a stock index “point” changes frequently. We call this perceptual phenomenon “point blindness.” We...