Matias Iaryczower

Judicial Independence in Unstable Environments, Argentina 1935-1998

Argentinas constitution and electoral rules promote a fragmented polity. It is in those environments that inde- pendent judiciaries develop. Instead, most analysts do not consider the Argentina judiciary as independent. In this article we attempt to explain this contradiction by showing that this perception is inappropriate. We de- velop a test of the hypothesis that the judiciary is independent by empiri- cally examining the political incen- tives faced by individual justices in their decision making. Our results show an often-defiant Court subject to constraints. Our measure of defi- ance is the probability of a non- aligned justice voting against the government. We find that judicial decision making was strategic. The probability of voting against the gov- ernment falls the stronger the control of the president over the legislature, but increases the less aligned the justice is with the President. Thus,

On the Nature of Competition in Alternative Electoral Systems

In this paper we argue that the number of candidates running for public office, their ideological differentiation, and the intensity of campaign competition are all naturally intertwined, and jointly determined in response to the incentives provided by the electoral system. We propose a simple general equilibrium model that integrates these elements in a unitary framework, and provide a comparison between majoritarian and proportional electoral systems.

Strategic Voting in Sequential Committees

We consider strategic voting with incomplete information and partially common values in sequential committees. A proposal is considered against the status quo in one committee, and only upon its approval advances for consideration in a second committee. Committee members (i) are privately and imperfectly informed about an unobservable state of nature which is relevant to their payoffs, and (ii) have a publicly observable bias with which they evaluate information. We show that the tally of votes in the originating committee can aggregate and transmit relevant information for members of the second committee in equilibrium, provide conditions for the composition and size of committees under which this occurs, and characterize all three classes of voting equilibria with relevant informative voting.

Can Words Get in the Way? The Effect of Deliberation in Collective Decision-Making

We quantify the effect of deliberation on the decisions of US appellate courts. We estimate a model in which strategic judges communicate before casting their votes and then compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no communication. The model has multiple equilibria, and preferences and information parameters are only partially identified. We find that there is a range of parameters in the identified set--when judges tend to disagree ex ante or their private information is imprecise--in which deliberation can be beneficial; otherwise, deliberation reduces the effectiveness of the court.

Contestable Leaderships, Party Discipline and Vote Buying in Legislatures

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties building on the premise that leaders need to maintain support within the organization to continue leading. Payments distributed by the incumbent on the spot increase the value of promises of future benefits by fostering individuals’ perceived chances that the incumbent will retain her position. The main result of the paper shows, in fact, that the party leader can use promises of future benefits to induce members to vote for a position disliked by the majority of the party only if she also distributes benefits on the spot.

Money in Judicial Politics: Individual Contributions and Collective Decisions

We study how campaign contributions affect the voting strategies and effectiveness of justices in the Supreme Court of eight US states. A judges voting strategy leans more heavily towards an interest group the larger are its contributions to the judge, and the smaller are its contributions to other members of the court. This indirect effect is consistent with an equilibrium adjustment to contributions to other members of the court. Observed contributions have a large effect on the behavior of individual judges - affecting both the probability that they vote to overturn a decision of the lower court and the probability that they support an incorrect decision - but they have a small effect on the decisions and effectiveness of the Court.

Choosing Policy-Makers: Learning from Past Decisions in a Changing Environment

A politician sets policy in a changing environment, while a voter learns about the ability of the politician in order to decide whether to reelect him or not. When the voter cannot observe which policies are optimal, policies are unresponsive to relevant information, and uninformative about the ability of the politician. When the voter can observe optimal policies with arbitrarily large noise and enough decisions by the politician, (i) the voter appoints good policy-makers and tosses out bad policy-makers almost always, (ii) the politician chooses policy as with no career concerns, and (iii) consistent policy records are indicative of ability when past information depreciates fast.