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...

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. ·...