John Ferejohn

Bargaining in Legislatures.

Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.

The budget process and the size of the budget

The new congressional budget process provides- members of Congress with a new set of institutional mechanisms for making budget decisions. This article addresses the question of whether or under what conditions rigid application of the new budget process (modeled as, first, selection of the size of the budget and, second, its division) produces smaller budgets than a piecemeal appropriations process in which the size of the budget is determined residually. The theoretical result is that the new process sometimes results in relatively large budgets. A testable implication of the theory is that given a choice of how stringently the budget process is to be employed, members of Congress jointly consider preferences and the expected outcomes under available institutional arrangements and select the arrangement (usually a rule) that yields the most favorable outcome. Empirical results from the budget process in the House from 1980 to 1983 are generally supportive of the theoretically derived hypothesis of rational choice of institutional arrangements.

Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-68

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A political theory of federalism

Multi-ethnic nations have sometimes found decentralized political arrangements attractive. Such arrangements permit peoples who may differ greatly in their conceptions of a good public life to develop and maintain their own separate communities, within the context of a larger and more powerful political economy. Ethnically more homogeneous nations such as the United States, at the time of its founding, or Australia today, often find decentralized modes of policy formation and administration convenient as well. In such nations, geographic distances, diverse economies, regional disparities in preferences, and variations in local historical experience can make decentralized policy-making institutions more efficient and more responsive than national ones. Federalism, the division of sovereign authority among levels of government, can be seen as a way of stabilizing, or making credible, decentralized governmental structures. This paper examines whether practical federal arrangements can sufficiently insulate governmental decisions at all levels to maintain a stable and credible decentralized political structure.

Limiting distributions for continuous state Markov voting models

This paper proves the existence of a stationary distribution for a class of Markov voting models. We assume that alternatives to replace the current status quo arise probabilistically, with the probability distribution at time t+1 having support set equal to the set of alternatives that defeat, according to some voting rule, the current status quo at time t. When preferences are based on Euclidean distance, it is shown that for a wide class of voting rules, a limiting distribution exists. For the special case of majority rule, not only does a limiting distribution always exist, but we obtain bounds for the concentration of the limiting distribution around a centrally located set. The implications are that under Markov voting models, small deviations from the conditions for a core point will still leave the limiting distribution quite concentrated around a generalized median point. Even though the majority relation is totally cyclic in such situations, our results show that such chaos is not probabilistically significant.

Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections

This article presents a method for analyzing the extent and strength of coattail voting in presidential elections. This method allows the authors to estimate the magnitude of coattail voting and then to decompose this estimate into more “basic†elements. Estimates are given for presidential elections beginning with 1956.The determination of the coattail vote and its decomposition depend on the theory of the voting decision that is assumed. In this article we present a model of vote determination that is similar in most respects to the traditional SRC model; the vote for congressional representation in a presidential election year is determined jointly by partisan affiliation, attitudes toward the presidential candidates, and local forces unique to the congressional race (such as may be captured by an incumbency variable). This model permits the separate estimation of the strength of short-term forces and of the efficiency of the presidential coattails.Application of the model to survey data since 1956 indicates that efficiency of presidential coattails has declined during this period. Furthermore, the 1980 election does not appear to be an exception to this trend. On the other hand there has not been any particular trend in the strength of short-term forces during this period; instead events peculiar to the context of a specific election generate short-term forces at the level of the presidential election, but the degree to which these forces are carried over to local races seems to have declined.

Unification, universalism, and rational choice theory

Green and Shapiros critique of rational choice theory underestimates the value of unification and the necessity of universalism in science. The central place of intentionality in social life makes both unification and universalism feasible norms in social science. However, “universalism” in social science may be partial, in that the independence hypothesis—that the causal mechanism governing action is context independent—may hold only locally in certain classes of choice domains.

The Constituency Component A Comparison of Service in Great Britain and the United States

The policymaking component of representation in the United States and Great Britain has been closely studied and compared, but the constituency component—the handling of constituent complaints and the protection of constituency interests—is less well understood. This article considers two questions about the constituency component of representation: how much and what kinds of casework services do MPs as opposed to members of Congress provide, and second, what are the statistical determinants of these activities? With regard to the first question, our findings indicate that MPs devote more of their own time to constituency work than do members of Congress. In addition, we identify representatives on both sides of the Atlantic who adopt a more aggressive strategy toward their constituency work. This strategy is manifested by such activities as publicizing successful cases, handling cases that concern local government matters, the frequency of surgeries, and the active solicitation of cases. In the second part of this article, we model these activities as being related to the electoral margin, party, and the year the representative was elected. These estimations indicate that casework entrepreneurs in both countries are most likely to be in marginal seats, recently elected, and Democrats or Labour.

A teoria da escolha racional na ciência política: conceitos de racionalidade em teoria política

The article claims that there is already a close connection between normative and positive projects in political theory. The argument is that, traditionally, normative political theorists have embraced rationality assumptions, both because they were interested in persuading an audience, presumably capable of responding to reasons, and because a normative theory deals with rational subjects, whose actions can be understood and perhaps changed by altering their institutional context. By examining the work of Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau the article attempts to do two things: first, to elucidate their conceptions of rationality and show the work rationality does within their theories. Second, the article examines how those conceptions (or interpretations) of rationality depart from current understandings and argues in favor of recovering some lost aspects of rationality as an analytical concept.

Uncertainty and the Formal Theory of Political Campaigns

Many empirical investigations indicate that information is scarce and therefore costly to holders and seekers of public office. Indeed, some studies suggest that imperfect information may account for important aspects of the behavior of politicians. Nevertheless, there is as yet no theoretical investigation of political decision making that illustrates the impact of costly information or behavior. In this paper the authors develop a model of electoral competition in which the candidates are only imperfectly aware of public preferences over issues and in which they may have the opportunity to increase the amount of information they hold at some cost. It turns out that the absence of perfect information profoundly affects the strategic structure of candidate competition. If information is costless, two-party electoral contests are naturally modeled as symmetric two-person zero-sum games. However, if candidates have distinct beliefs about voter behavior, the natural game-theoretic representation becomes a non-zero-sum game. This article is concerned mostly with analyzing the consequences of this transformation.