What is asked, or should be asked, of the law student is not that he learn, by heart, and in all their detail, all the rules in force during his time as student: that will be of little service to him in his later professional life when many of those rules will have changed. Of far greater importance to the student will be a knowledge of the structure within which the rules and concepts are orga...

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former made up more than half all state legislators until late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were likely to be Democrats and voted conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity elect was positively correlat...

Forest operations involve several different actors. Each actor imposes their own requirements on the harvester in relation to differing roles industry, whether they are concerned with itself, information, environmental concerns, etc. The manufacturers of harvesters need meet imposed by multiple actors, among them logging contractors, whose survival depends harvesters. This paper aims identify p...

Abstract In this research note we examine the impacts of legislators' age on their representational behavior in Hong Kong by conducting content analyses questions raised members legislature (LegCo) at plenary meetings from 1998 to 2016. We explore whether young legislators were more likely than older represent youth interests. Our results show that did not significantly affect behavior. propose...

In this paper we provide a political game where agents decide whether to become legislators or politicians. Legislators determine the political institutions constraining politicians’ behavior and politicians compete for gaining the power to make decisions about the level of the public good. We derive the following results: i) Political competition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition f...

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are s...

Theoretical analyses of party positions commonly assume that parties act as teams to maximize their legislative representation. This assumption runs counter to another line of theorizing in which individual legislators maximize their own chances of winning reelection. To resolve this tension, the paper presents a model of party platform choice that relaxes only the assumption that parties are t...

This paper examines the incentives of voters to appoint legislators with different preferences from their own. The paper adopts an underlying legislative bargaining model proposed by Volden and Wiseman (2007) in which legislators with heterogeneous preferences divide a fixed budget between a public good and pork projects (local public goods). We show that voters have an incentive to strategical...

Technological advances in information collection and analysis have created a conflict between individual privacy rights and society’s interest in free information flow. The increased availability of information offers great benefits to scientific research, business intelligence, and national security. However, individuals are losing control of their personal information, as their medical, finan...

This paper examines information dissemination within legislatures and its effect on legislative decision making. Specifically, I examine the propensity for “informational cascades” to develop when members of Congress publicly announce positions on legislation. An information cascade is a pattern of conformity that arises when an individual, having observed the behavior of others, disregards his...