I present a formal model of the comparative effects of multi-member and single-member districts on legislative and electoral behavior and outcomes. In my model voters choose legislators to maximize pork production. In both systems voters face a moral hazard problem and a learning problem as they attempt to asses how hard the incumbents have worked and how skillful the incumbents are. However, i...

In this article, we propose a random walk-based model to predict legislators’ votes on a set of bills. In particular, we first convert roll call data, i.e. the recorded votes and the corresponding deliberative bodies, to a heterogeneous graph, where both the legislators and bills are treated as vertices. Three types of weighted edges are then computed accordingly, representing legislators’ soci...

Elsewhere (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010), we examine a game where each legislator has preferences over (i) the resulting policy and (ii) how he or she votes. The latter preferences are especially important when the legislator is not pivotal. We show that when the game follows the normal rules of legislatures—most important, that legislators can change their vote after seeing how their fellow legi...

Accountability in legislative representation implies that candidates communicate to voters what they will do if elected, that information about actions once in office is available to constituents, that representatives are responsive to the preferences and demands of constituents, and that they are punished for lack of responsiveness. There is an inherent tension between party discipline and res...

In a two-party legislature, districts represented by the majority may receive greater funds if majority-party legislators have greater proposal power or disproportionately form coalitions with each other. Funding types received by districts may depend on their legislators’ party identity when party preferences differ. Estimates from the United States, using fixedeffect and regression-discontinu...

It is well established that geographic areas benefit, in terms of the share of government spending they capture, from having a legislator with longer tenure, holding constant the tenure of other legislators. However, the implications of this literature for how the total production of legislation changes if all members gained seniority is less clear. Increased levels and dispersion of seniority ...