Comparing Legislatures in Moldova and Macedonia

Seniority and Incumbency in Legislatures

In this article, we elaborate on a strategic view of institutional features. Our focus is on seniority, though we note that this general approach may also be deployed to understand other aspects of institutional arrangements. We have taken the initial game-theoretic model of seniority of McKelvey and Riezman (1992), simplified it in order to characterize its fundamental implications, generalize...

In Defense of Legislatures

It is not every day that a scholar stoops to defend legislatures. Oh sure, lots of political theorists rush to the defense of democracy in the abstract, but they often have little to say about actual democratic practice. By contrast, empirical political scientists (and “positive political theorists”) have lavished attention on the institutions of democratic governance such as legislatures (part...

Drawing Better Lines: Comparing Commissions to Legislatures on Compactness and Coterminosity

Groseclose and Snyder in finite legislatures

The Groseclose and Snyder (1996) model is one of the best-known models of vote buying in legislatures. Although the logic of the model is compelling, it is not clear that its key propositions, derived in a continuous set-up, hold in finite legislatures. This is an important issue because many real-world legislatures are small and should be modeled as finite in order to make predictions on coali...

Autocratic Legislatures and Expropriation Risk

An important question for international investors concerns the relationship between political institutions and property rights. Yet a debate remains over whether authoritarian institutions promote favorable investment climates. Using data on oil nationalization in a sample of autocracies, this study finds that legislatures are correlated with lower expropriation risk in non-personalist dictator...