Thomas H. Hammond

Rethinking Allison's Models

The ideas in Graham Allisons Essence of Decision (1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allisons work has received considerable critical attention, there has been surprisingly little examination of the content and internal logic of his models. We subject each of Allisons three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial reformulation.

THE CORE OF THE CONSTITUTION

It is often argued that the United States Constitution was designed so as to create a stable political order. Yet in the literature on the formal theory of democracy, there has been very little examination of constitutional provisions for their stability-inducing properties. In this paper we demonstrate that bicameralism and the executive veto tend to create stability, that the legislative override of the executive veto tends to undermine this stability, and that the interaction of bicameralism and the executive veto is likely to produce stable outcomes despite the destabilizing impact of the veto override.

Deference or Preference

Presidential nominees for executive office are almost always confirmed by the Senate. There is considerable disagreement in the literature about what accounts for this Senate behavior. Some scholars argue that the high degree of presidential success reflects a norm of senatorial deference to presidential wishes. Other scholars argue that while senators may say that it is desirable for the Senate to defer to the presidents choices for administrative office, their behavior in the confirmation process betrays an intense interest in the nominees policy views. In this paper we present a model of the appointment process which is based on senatorial and presidential policy preferences. This model is able to account for several major aspects of presidential success in the appointment process. It also provides a framework for further study of other aspects of appointments.

Some Complex Answers to the Simple Question ‘Do Institutions Matter?’ Policy Choice and Policy Change in Presidential and Parliamentary Systems

Much current research in political science focuses on the impact which political institutions have on policy outcomes. A substantial body of this ‘neo-institutional’ work, often organized around the question, ‘Do institutions matter?’, examines differences in the performance of presidential and parliamentary systems. The conventional wisdom in the literature has been that presidential and parliamentary systems tend to select different policies and exhibit different patterns of policy change. But the key question is whether the two different kinds of institutional systems should necessarily be expected to choose different policies or exhibit different patterns of policy change. This paper emphasizes that one cannot draw valid inferences about the nature of policy choice and policy change in different kinds of institutional systems just by considering the institutional rules alone. Instead, if we wish to compare the nature of policy choice and policy change in the different systems, it is essential to consider the interaction between the institutional rules and the policy preferences of the individual officeholders in these systems. And what must be compared involves the sets of policy equilibria produced by each of the systems. When these policy equilibria are systematically compared across institutional systems, the results about policy choice and policy change do not always support the inference that ‘institutions matter’.

Committees and the core of the Constitution

An ongoing debate in the formal theory of legislatures involves the question of why these institutions (apparently) manifest so much stability. That is, why do the institutions not continually upset policies adopted only a short time before? A large number of answers have been advanced. This paper proposes that the stability derives from the interaction of two factors, (i) the fundamental constitutional rules (bicameralism, executive veto, and veto override) that structure the legislative process, and (ii) the committee systems endowed with veto powers that many American legislatures have developed. This interaction, we argue, can create a core — a set of undominated points — so large that even a substantial change in the legislatures members (reflecting electoral outcomes, for example) will be unlikely to shift its location enough for the status quo to be upset.

Bicameralism and the Core: An Experimental Test

While the primary problem confronting democratic theorists in the past several decades has been majority rule instability, recent formal results suggest that this problem is diminished by long-standing constitutional provisions such as bicameralism. Bicameralism should theoretically be much more likely to create a set of stable and undominated outcomes-a core. This paper reports a series of experiments testing whether individuals partitioned into two chambers do in fact behave as the formal theory of bicameralism predicts. In two sets of trials, the outcome chosen under a given bicameral partition is almost always in the bicameral core for that partition, and a change in the bicameral partition has a statistically significant impact on the choice of outcome.

Intercameral Bargaining and Intracameral Organization in Legislatures

We argue that chambers have an incentive to create committees unrepresentative of themselves. In a bicameral setting, a committee within a chamber has two roles: as policy advisor for the parent chamber, and an additional role, less often recognized in the literature, as an agent for bargaining with the other chamber. In the former role, sound advice requires that the committee be representative of the chamber’s preferences. In the latter role, a committee can be an effective bargaining agent if it is willing to reject proposals that the chamber cannot commit to reject. But this requires the committee to be unrepresentative of the chamber. Optimal committee design reflects a tension between the chamber’s desire for a trustworthy (and therefore representative) advisor and a “tough” (and therefore unrepresentative) bargaining agent. Thus intercameral interactions can affect optimal intracameral arrangements; therefore, unicameral theories of legislative organization may overlook important factors.

Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies

This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a “bottom-up” manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organizational choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational membership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.

Baselines for Evaluating Explanations of Coalition Behavior in Congress

Students of Congress sometimes interpret congressional history in terms of the rise and fall of coalitions among the parties and factions. What standard should be used to judge explanations of why these coalitions form when they do and why they win? We argue that for an explanation to be judged an advance in knowledge it should account for events better than a model based purely on chance. In this paper we determine how often various coalitions can be expected to occur by chance on House and Senate roll calls and, when each coalition occurs, how often it should be expected to win. We then compare actual coalition occurrence and win rates to these expected rates in the House and Senate from 1921 through 1978. The differences between the actual and expected rates set a standard which substantive theories of coalition behavior should be required to outperform.

Domestic Veto Institutions, Divided Government, and the Status Quo: A Spatial Model of Two-Level Games with Complete Information

The role of domestic institutions and politics has long been of interest to students of international politics and foreign policy formulation (Corwin 1917). Of course, some theories of international politics—especially the various strands of Realism (Layne 1993, 1994; Mearsheimer 2001; Morgenthau 1949; Waltz 1979)—assert that domestic politics has no impact at all on the politics among nations; instead, what matters almost exclusively are national power, especially the nation’s economic and military capabilities. Other schools of thought, however, do allow some room for domestic politics to play a role. For example, arguments have long been made (see Lippman 1922, 1925), and empirical studies appear to demonstrate (Baum 2002; Graham 1989; Holsti 1996; Mueller 1973; Nincic 1992a; Page and Barabas 2000) that public opinion influences foreign policy decisions. More recently, some scholars have suggested that domestic economic conditions can affect a nation’s propensity to use military force abroad (Davies 2002; James and Oneal 1991; Morgan and Bickers 1992; Ostrom and Job 1986; Russett 1990a) as well as its propensity to engage in cooperative international ventures (Lindsay, Sayrs, and Steger 1992). Some studies have even inverted this “diversionary” theory of conflict, suggesting that domestic political vulnerability may increase the probability of becoming a target of aggression (Chiozza and Goemans 2004; Gelpi 1997; Huth and Allee 2003; Leeds and Davis 1997).