We consider a two period model in which an incumbent political party chooses the level of a current policy variable unilaterally, but faces competition from a political opponent in the future. Both parties care about voters payoffs, but they have different beliefs about how policy choices will...

Fenno's classic paper, "The Appropriations Committee as a Political System" (1962), focuses on the norms and institutions that are the foundations of House Appropriations Committee’s (HAC) success. The fundamental idea is that of committee integration, the degree to which committee members...

Using a laboratory experiment, we behaviourally study the impact of a sudden increase in the common-pool size on within-group conflict, i.e., the paradox of the plenty. We also consider the potential role of governance in avoiding this paradox. In the first stage, a randomly-chosen leader of the...

The capacity to sustain policies over time and the capacity to adjust policies in the face of changing circumstances are two desirable properties of policymaking systems. The veto player approach has suggested that polities with more veto players will have the capacity to sustain policies at the...

What explains significant variation across countries in the use of vote buying instead of campaign promises to secure voter support? This paper explicitly models the tradeoff parties face between engaging in vote buying and making campaign promises, and explores the distributional consequences...

It is well known that being the proposer or agenda setter is advantagenous in many collective decision making situations. In the canonical model of distributive bargaining (Baron and Ferejon, 1989), proposers are certain of being part of the coalition that forms, and, conditional on being in the...

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of...

To analyze players' strategic alliance behavior, we introduce a new noncooperative coalitional bargaining model, in which each player can buy out other players with upfront transfers. We uncover the role of an essential player in a transferable utility game, or a veto player in a simple game, in...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...