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Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The main goal of the paper is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. To achieve this goal we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and we estimate this model using a newly collected data set. Given estimates of the structural model, we assess reelection probabilities for members of Congress, estimate the effect of congressional experience on private and public sector wages, and quantify the value of a congressional seat. Moreover, we use the estimated model to assess how the imposition of term limits would affect the career decisions of politicians and the returns to a career in Congress.

Models of government formation processes in multi party democracies are usually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs (i.e., the parties selected to propose a potential government). The theoretical literature has focused on two selection rules: selection proportional to seat share, and selection in order of seat share. In this paper we use a new data set on government formations in 11 parliamentary democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data. We find that while there is little empirical support for selection in order of seat share, proportional selection fits the data well.

Models of government formation processes in multi-party democracies are unusually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs. The formal literature has exclusively focused on two selection rules: selection proportional to seat share (Baron and Ferejohn 1989), and selection in order of seat share (Austen-Smith and Banks 1988). In this paper we use a new data set on government formation attempts in 12 multi-party democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data. We find that while there is no empirical support for selection in order of seat share, proportional selection may serve as a good first approximation. However, our results also indicate that formateur selection exhibits a significant incumbency effect: ceteris paribus, the former prime minister's party is more likely to be selected to attempt the formation of the next government.

Generative Social Science . Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling. By Joshua M. Epstein . Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2006. 378 pp. plus CD. $49.50, £29.95. ISBN 9780691125473. Princeton Studies in Complexity. This collection of papers by Epstein and his collaborators is presented as an argument that the best way to explain social science phenomena is to model them.

In this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. Our analysis accounts for the following observed phenomena: (1) Cabinet reshuffles; (2) Cabinet replacements; (3) Early elections; (4) surplus governments; (5) Minority governments; (6) The relative instability of minority governments.

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislatures have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance in internal organization across legislatures which is indicated by the comparative study of legislative politics. To analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the organizational choices of legislatures we adopt a vote-buying model (Groseclose and Snyder 1994) and then consider the incentives to delegate decision rights in a multi-chamber noncooperative game. Our main result states that multi-cameral legislatures encourage the existence of internal veto players or super-majority rules, while unicameral bodies provide incentives to delegate power to a single actor such as a prime minister or party leader.

This paper compares the incentives to create obstructive committee systems under different constitutionally specified requirements for passing legislation. The Shapley value is used to measure the distribution of bargaining power in the legislature. If the legislature is bicameral or the president can veto, then each chamber of the legislature can increase its total bargaining power, at the expense of the other chamber or the president, by giving its committee chairmen the power to block legislation. This incentive to let committees act as gatekeepers with veto power can persist even when such power may cause some opportunities for beneficial legislation to be lost. This incentive is absent, however, in unicameral parliamentary systems.

While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear persuaded by the information they reveal. In this paper we explore the premise that hearings may not be informative to committees but may provide crucial information to the floor. We show that, if hearings have some intrinsic informative content and are costly, even extreme committees can transmit useful information to the floor. Furthermore, the possibility of holding hearings creates an incentive for extreme committees to specialize and reveal information simply by the decision whether to hold hearings.

We attempt to resolve a recent controversy in the study of cabinet terminations pertaining to the shape of hazard rates. On the one hand, Warwick (1992b) provides evidence that cabinets are more likely to terminate the longer they are in office. Alt and King's (1994) analysis, on the other hand, suggests that hazard rates are constant over the life-time of a cabinet. This issue is of particular theoretical importance, since a constant hazard rate would add support to the nonstrategic model of cabinet termination due to Browne et al. (1986) while an increasing hazard rate would seem to favor Lupia and Strom's (1995) strategic approach. By applying a semi-parametric competing risk approach to data on cabinet durations, we are able to show that through its use of theory-based censoring the previous literature in effect analyzed only one mode in which cabinets terminate: the case where one cabinet is replaced by another without a new election. Once cabinet terminations that lead to chamber dissolutions with subsequent elections are analyzed directly, we can show that they are governed by a very different stochastic process. Hazard rates are not flat as in the case of replacements, but increase over the life of the government. Further the covariates governing replacement terminations fail to explain dissolution terminations. These findings add support to the strategic approach suggested by Lupia and Strom.

In this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies. We use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government formation process, the type of coalitions that form, and their relative stability.