The Constitutional Choice of Bicameralism

Studies of political economy in recent years have placed emphasis on the operating characteristics of political and economic institutions. The premise of this work is that constitutional features of the political economy provide a structure of institutional incentives inducing equilibrium behavior and practices by optimizing agents. At both the theoretical and empirical levels there are comparisons in the literature of the equilibrium tendencies of classes of political arrangements (see, for example, Persson and Tabellini 2000, 2005, respectively). Political agents behave differently (targeting benefits, producing public goods, regulating the economy, extracting rents), and the effects of their collective choices differ (size and composition of spending, level of debt, productivity and growth of the economy) in presidential and parliamentary regimes, in unicameral and bicameral legislatures, under majoritarian and proportional electoral systems, and more generally in autocratic and democratic political economies. This research has made clear that explanations of collective choice require attention to institutional building blocks in order to anticipate equilibrium performance under