Instituting
Special Interest Groups Versus Voters and the Political Economics of Attention
Patrick Balles, Ulrich Matter & Alois Stutzer
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate whether US House representatives favour special interest groups over constituents in periods of low media attention to politics. Analysing 666 roll calls from 2005 to 2018, we show that representatives are more likely to vote against their constituency’s preferred position the more special interest money they receive from groups favouring the opposite position. The latter effect is significantly larger when less attention is paid to politics due to distraction by exogenous newsworthy events like natural disasters. The effect is mostly driven by short-term opportunistic behaviour than the short-term scheduling of controversial votes in periods with high news pressure.
Between Boardrooms and the Beltway: The Career Paths of Senior Regulators
Ran Duchin & Jeffery (Yudong) Wang
Boston College Working Paper, April 2024
Abstract:
We compile a comprehensive database of senior federal regulators and trace their full career paths since college graduation across the private and public sectors. We find that revolving-door moves across the private and public sectors are ubiquitous, persistent, correlated with economic and election cycles, and typically occur several times over the course of one’s career. Revolving-door regulators exhibit more regulatory (but not deregulatory) activity, stricter enforcement, and higher regulation complexity. Further, they work for stronger firms, come from relatively poorer backgrounds, and accumulate more wealth throughout their careers. Overall, we quantify regulators’ incentives to build financial, bureaucratic, and human capital.
Rational Gridlock
Scott Baker & Michael Gilbert
University of Virginia Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
We examine the design of lawmaking institutions when advocates have agenda setting power and there is randomness in the status quo. The institutional designer maximizes voter welfare. We find that the optimal arrangement consists of two lawmaking institutions that must agree to enact any reforms. The institutions do not share preferences with one another or with the median voter. As a result, gridlock arises: the institutions reject some reforms that the median voter favors. However, when reform succeeds, it tends to be modest in scope and to more closely track what the median voter prefers. The optimal design trades off the cost of failing to change law due to gridlock against the benefit of forcing advocates to moderate their proposals and offer more centrist reforms. Surprisingly, voters are best served by a pair of polarized and unrepresentative institutions.
The Local Lawmaking Loophole
Daniel Rosenbaum
Yale Law Journal, June 2024, Pages 2613-2700
Abstract:
Local governments contract with each other for a wide variety of purposes: to deliver services, administer grant money, coordinate emergency responses, and manage infrastructure projects. These interlocal agreements (ILAs) have been embraced by local officials keen to forge administrative efficiencies in an environment of limited resources. By contracting with neighboring and overlapping governments, a local entity can draw upon funding and technical skills that it does not otherwise possess alone, operating in theory to the ultimate benefit of residents across its region. Yet, the growing prevalence of ILAs belies two underappreciated features of their use. First, when governments enter into ILAs, they do not only exchange basic services and pursue technocratic efficiencies; they also create new policies, announce substantive priorities, and establish new governance frameworks. ILAs are especially prominent in collaborative policing regimes. Acting through an ILA, local governments can expand and dissolve policing jurisdictions, create new cross-jurisdictional policing programs, increase and consolidate jail facilities, and provide rights to certain inmates while declining to extend those same rights to others. ILAs thus function as consequential lawmaking documents -- even as they also operate outside the ordinary legislative channels that constrict formal exercises of local power. Second, ILAs fundamentally suffer from a deficit of democratic accountability. Local legislatures are remarkably removed from the negotiations by which ILAs are executed, implemented, monitored, and modified. The very factors that make ILAs potent -- vague and confidential terms, malleable ratification procedures, ironclad contract law fortifications -- render them difficult for members of the public to scrutinize, let alone, at times, even access. And ILAs regularly give birth to brand-new local government entities, which then breed with each other, using subsequent ILAs to create subsequent local entities, a domino effect of local power and attenuated local accountability. The promise of ILAs as organs of regional lawmaking comes at the peril of public transparency. This mismatch -- between expansive power and limited transparency -- is no legal accident, but rather can be traced directly to state statutory schemes. Nearly all states have adopted interlocal cooperation acts that broadly empower ILAs and often contain filing requirements to ensure their transparency. Yet public stakeholders systematically fail to take these requirements seriously. Local governments do not consistently follow them, state agencies do not consistently monitor them, and courts do not consistently enforce them. Their collective inactions enable a transparency void. As this Article explains, ILAs must -- and can -- be brought more firmly into the local governance spotlight without sacrificing their increasingly integral role in the legislative toolkit. In the process, the Article also paints a different picture of local institutions under a federal system: one where local actors navigate state oversight as it is expressed through administrative silence, separate and distinct from manifestations of oversight expressed through political voice.
Congressional Apportionment: A Multiobjective Optimization Approach
Steven Shechter
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two events, with major implications for U.S. voters, occur after each decennial census. First, congressional “apportionment” takes place, followed by congressional “districting.” Apportionment determines how to allocate the 435 seats in the House of Representatives across the 50 states, whereas districting determines the geographic boundaries assigned to representatives within each state. Although districting and the practice of gerrymandering often receive great attention in the media and courts, the best way to apportion representatives across states has been debated for nearly 250 years. Historical methods (including the current method) each satisfy some desirable optimality criteria that the others are not guaranteed to satisfy. Moreover, none are guaranteed to optimize certain reasonable fairness measures (e.g., minimum range, minimum bias). To our knowledge, we are the first to formulate and analyze a multiobjective optimization approach to apportionment, allowing policymakers to identify Pareto-optimal allocations and quantify their trade-offs between several competing criteria. Some of these models can be formulated and solved as mixed-integer linear programs, whereas others require the solution of mixed-integer, nonconvex, quadratically constrained quadratic programs. We take advantage of recent software advances that allow one to solve these problems with optimality guarantees. Policy implications of our work include Pareto curves from historical censuses and simulations, which suggest opportunities for improvement in some objectives at little sacrifice to others.
Crediting Invisible Work: Congress and the Lawmaking Productivity Metric (LawProM)
Mandi Eatough & Jessica Preece
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Congressional observers have long been interested in the distinction between legislative “workhorses” and “showhorses.” However, when scholars operationalize this by measuring legislator productivity, they often neglect many realities of modern lawmaking by focusing on the traditional bill sponsorship and passage process. To better align measurement with practice, we compile widely available data on bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and amendments; we also use text-as-data methods to credit instances of behind-the-scenes lawmaking via text reuse between bills. We weight achievements from each of these lawmaking methods to create the Lawmaking Productivity Metric for House Members of the 101–113th Congresses. Including methods of lawmaking beyond bill sponsorship provides important insights about who the congressional workhorses are. In particular, we find that traditional measures systematically undercount the legislative successes of women and likely Black Members of Congress because they disproportionately legislate in less visible ways.