_s Party Polarization and Legislative Gridlock

Does Partisan Polarization Lead to Policy Gridlock in California? Figure: Partisan Polarization and Gridlock in California The recent rise in gridlock cannot be solely explained by increases in polarization

Conditional Party Government in the States

©2002 by the Midwest Political Science Association A lthough theories about legislative politics continue to proliferate, their range of empirical application is all too often limited, generally encompassing only the U.S. Congress or even just the House. Here, we conduct what is essentially comparative research by testing theories of parties and committees in a number of state legislatures. Thi...

W . ALLEN WALLIS Institute of POLITICAL ECONOMY UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER Dynamics of the Presidential Veto : A Computational

We specify and compute equilibria of a dynamic policy-making game between a president and a legislature under insitutional rules that emulate those of the US Constitution. Policies are assumed to lie in a two-dimensional space in which one issue dimension captures systemic differences in partisan preferences, while the other summarizes non-partisan attributes of policy. In any period, the polic...

Party Polarization in Legislatures with Office-Motivated Candidates

We develop a theory of legislative competition in which voters care about local candidate valence and national party positions that are determined by the parties’ median legislators. As long as election outcomes are predictable enough, the only stable equilibria exhibit policy divergence between the parties. If the degree of uncertainty about election outcomes decreases, and if voters place les...

Comparative Politics with Endogenous Intra-Party Discipline1

Party discipline is known to be di¤erent in Parliamentary and in Presidential democracies. Yet, the theoretical literature is silent about why parties adopt such di¤erent structures. We propose a setup where parties are brands. They strategically choose both their ideological position and their internal discipline. The latter introduces a trade-o¤ between the informativeness of the party label ...