Congressional apportionment and the fourteenth amendment

This paper examines state interest in the nine bases of congressional seat apportionment considered for the House of Representatives as part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. We ask, what if voters preferred apportionments that delivered larger vote shares to their state? We then show that among all states, one basis of apportionment was a weak Condorcet winner, while the others were in a vote cycle. In both chambers of Congress, however, pure majority voting created orderings of the nine bases and a different Condorcet winner. Ironically, Congress did not select either Condorcet winner. Instead, a population-based apportionment was reported out of committee and passed both chambers as a consequence of agenda control and lack of pairwise voting. Our analysis provides an example of how agenda setting with incomplete information unintentionally can produce undesirable outcomes for a legislature.

     

Global policymakers and catastrophic risk

Policy Sciences - There is a rapidly developing literature on risks that threaten the whole of humanity, or a large part of it. Discussion is increasingly turning to how such risks can be governed....     

Gridlock and Delegation in a Changing World

Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of policy‐making in a changing world, we develop a positive theory that captures political drift in a dynamic separation‐of‐powers system. We show analytically that a distinctive combination of legislative supermajoritarianism and agency discretion—institutional features that, in isolation, elicit widespread criticism—can effectively ameliorate policies' susceptibility to the vicissitudes of exogenous change. The critical mechanism for governmental accommodation of drift is delegation, which increases all decision makers' well‐being by reducing fluctuations in outcomes. Although the complete smoothing of outcomes is attainable in a separation‐of‐ powers system, we show that this is typically not achieved in equilibrium. The presence of drift provides an opportunity for self‐interested legislators to extract a distributional benefit from their fellow legislators at the expense of overall policymaking efficiency.