John W. Patty

Business as usual: interest group access and representation across policy-making venues

We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. Firstly, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Secondly, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proportion of groups also lobby the bureaucracy. Thirdly, representational biases in legislative lobbying are replicated across venues: business groups dominate administrative lobbying at least as much as they do legislative lobbying. Finally, the level of interest group activity in one venue for a given policy area is strongly related to its level in the other venue. The findings potentially have important implications for the impact of institutional design on both the form and promotion of broad participation in policy-making as well as the ultimate content of policies chosen by democratic governments, broadly construed.

Whose Ear to Bend? Information Sources and Venue Choice in Policy-Making

Important conceptualizations of both interest groups and bureaucratic agencies suggest that these institutions provide legislatures with greater information for use in policy-making. Yet little is known about how these information sources interact in the policy process as a whole. In this paper we consider this issue analytically, and develop a model of policy-making in which multiple sources of information – from the bureaucracy, an interest group, or a legislatures own in-house development – can be brought to bear on policy. Lobbyists begin this process by selecting a venue – Congress or a standing bureaucracy – in which to press for a policy change. The main findings of the paper are that self-selection of lobbyists into different policy-making venues can be informative per se, and that this self-selection can make legislatures prefer delegation to ideologically distinct bureaucratic agents over ideologically close ones. Changes within the FederalTrade Commission during the 1970s are reinterpreted in the context of our model.

Equivalence of Objectives in Two Candidate Elections

This paper examines the incentives facing candidates in twocandidate elections. In particular, we provide a set ofsufficient conditions for the optimal strategies of votemaximizing, plurality maximizing, and probability of victorymaximizing candidates to be identical. In addition, we examineand provide counterexamples to two oft-cited results due toHinich (1977) and Ledyard (1984) regarding the equivalence ofthese objectives in large two candidate elections.

The Politics of Biased Information

The effects of any important political decision are always to some degree uncertain. This uncertainty may be ameliorated by the collection of policy-relevant information. Predictably, if such information is biased, then political decisions based on that information will be biased as well. This paper explores the converse of this statement: if the policymaker is biased, will the information provided to him or her also be biased? It is shown in this paper that, in equilibrium, information provided to a sufficiently biased policymaker will inherit the policymakers bias. Accordingly, the provision of biased policy-relevant information is not evidence of an attempt to produce biased policy decisions. The implications of the theory are examined within the context of modern administrative policymaking within the United States Federal Government.

The House Discharge Procedure and Majoritarian Politics

This paper discusses the details of the discharge procedure in the House of Representatives and their implications for theories of legislative politics. While the discharge procedure is frequently cited as the tool by which committee obstruction within the House can be overcome, I argue that, under close examination, the procedure actually is far from purely majoritarian. Specifically, I argue that the details of the discharge procedure imply that the support of either the Speaker of the House or a majority of the Rules Committee is necessary to ensure floor consideration for a bill. Accordingly, in a de jure sense, the Houses discharge procedure is irrelevant.

THE SELECTION OF POLICIES FOR BALLOT INITIATIVES: WHAT VOTERS CAN LEARN FROM LEGISLATIVE INACTION

This paper models the process through which proposals are placed on the ballot as initiatives. Importantly, proposals that reach the ballot were not enacted by the legislature. We show that this fact has important consequences for the type of policy proposals that reach the ballot: as the legislature would enact any proposal that increases everyones utility (in expectation), proposals that reach the ballot must be bad for some segment of the population. We partition the population into voters who would benefit from a groups proposal and those who would not and show that voters can use the legislatures inaction to obtain a better estimate of the initiatives expected value. In particular, we show that voters that are not in the sponsoring group infer that proposals that become initiatives have negative expected value and that the expected value of an initiative is decreasing in the size of the group that sponsors it.

Arguments-Based Collective Choice

This article presents a model of collective choice when group decisions must be justified by arguments from first principles. Individuals may have preferences over both the actions chosen and the arguments used to justify them. Defining a notion of stability in the arguments made and actions supported within a group, I characterize the set of actions that can be justified as well as the arguments that will be used to justify these actions. Of particular interest in the article is the fact that each individuals preferences over different arguments are endogenously determined by the collection of actions justified by the arguments.

Incommensurability and Issue Voting

In this article, I examine several models of voter behavior that are consistent with recent work in political psychology (Fiske and Tetlock, 1997) concerning incommensurability and individuals’ reluctance to make decisions involving explicit trade-offs between competing ideals or principles. In so doing, I show that one ramification of such cognitive dissonance is policy convergence in multidimensional (i.e. multi-issue) electoral competition between two parties or candidates. Furthermore, the predicted policy outcome is a weighted median, which represents, on each issue, each voter’s preferences to the degree that he or she is likely to use that issue to choose between the candidates.

Agreeing to fight: an explanation of the democratic peace:

In this article, we extend the well-known ‘agreeing-to-disagree’ and ‘no-trade’ results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this result might provide one possible explanation for the empirical finding, often referred to as the ‘democratic peace’, that modern democracies rarely go to war with one another. We propose that the informational properties of pluralistic institutions (as opposed to oligarchies or dictatorships) lead to better decision-making by democracies and that democracies are therefore more likely to be the rational actors necessary for the ‘no-war’ result. We discuss empirical evidence in support of this proposition.

A social choice theory of legitimacy

We develop a formal theory of legitimate collective choice. In our theory a policy choice is legitimate if the process through which the final choice was determined is consistent with some principle that can be used to (perhaps partially) rank the potential policy choices. The set of principles in any choice situation is taken to be exogenous, but a decision-making process is defined so as to deal with any nontrivial set of principles. Such a process is itself referred to as legitimate if it is guaranteed to select a legitimate outcome for each possible exogenous set of principles. We characterize the class of procedures that are legitimate, prove that legitimate policy decisions consistent with principles always exist and characterize the set of policy decisions that are legitimate for a any given set of principles. As we do not require the principles to be weak orders of the alternatives, our theory provides a notion of legitimacy that can be satisfied even when the guiding principles are potentially cyclic or incomplete. Accordingly, our theory illustrates one nontautological means by which majoritarian principles can be reconciled with legitimacy.