Thomas H Hammond
Biographic Data
| ID | 1044085 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas H Hammond |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas H |
| FAMILY NAME | Hammond |
| SIGNATURE | HAMMOND T H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4151-7845 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 642 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
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…
Intelligence Organizations and the Organization of Intelligence
“In the real world of strategic analysis, warning signals are usually scattered across individuals and bureaucratic units.” 1 Steve Chan “...the intelligence of grand strategy and national security i
Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court
Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion‐writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We tes…
Rank injustice
Learning in Hierarchies
The formal hierarchical structures of organizations can be expected to affect the organizations' behavior in many different ways. One kind of impact is that their structures may affect how their knowledge is organized. This is important because the different ways in which knowledge can be organized may affect what the organizations' decision makers learn from the information that their organizations have gathered, stored, and processed. However, …
Why Is the Intelligence Community So Difficult to Redesign? Smart Practices, Conflicting Goals, and the Creation of Purpose‐Based Organizations
The adoption of “smart practices” requires that smart practices can actually be identified for the areas of public policy in which we are interested. For the problem of designing structures for public agencies, however, identifying smart practices is not easy. This article explores the reasons for the substantial conservativism, lasting over 50 years, regarding the structural design of the U.S. intelligence community. One central argument is simp…
Some Complex Answers to the Simple Question ‘Do Institutions Matter
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 an…
Bicameralism and the Core
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…
Formal Theory and the Institutions of Governance
Understanding governance in the world's democracies requires study of the political institutions — the chief executives, the bureaucracies, and the legislatures — most involved in national policymaking. There are many approaches to the study of these institutions. This article examines the potential of an approach which is relatively unfamiliar to most students of governance: the development of formal mathematical theories of political institutio…
Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics
Efficient incentive-compatible schemes for resolving hidden action and hidden information problems have been shown to exist, thereby offering the hope that public goods can be provided in a neutral, non-political way. We argue that this hope is illusory. Such schemes inevitably generate a residual profit, and a property right to the residual creates a stake in inefficiency; the residual can be increased by a distortion of the efficient incentive …
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 president's choices for administrat…
Toward A General Theory Of Hierarchy
Information processing and policymaking, in any kind of institution, involve the making of comparisons. For information processing, the comparisons are among bits of data. For policymaking, the comparisons are among alternative options. Many of our institutions are hierarchies, and this essay examines, for a wide range of institutions, how hierarchies structure the making of the comparisons
Moral hazard in work organizations
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's 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 Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies
Committees and the core of the Constitution
In Defence of Luther Gulick's‘notes on the Theory of Organization
This article reviews a debate in public administration which occurred some 40 years ago between two giants of public administration, Luther Gulick and Herbert Simon. Simon is generally considered to have ‘won’ the debate in the 1940s and 195Os, and there is good reason to think that this ‘victory’ turned the field of public administration in a direction very different from where it had been headed previously. The paper makes two arguments. The fi…
The Deregulatory Snowball
Most theories of regulatory politics have a common implication: once regulations are in place, they are exceedingly difficult to remove. At best, a particular regulatory regime will remain stable for a long period of time; at worst, regulation will beget even more regulation. Given these theories the deregulation that has occurred in the American economy in the past decade is almost inexplicable. Several reasons have been suggested for this dereg…
Distant friends and nearby enemies
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 st…
Agenda Control, Organizational Structure, and Bureaucratic Politics
The literature on has not given adequate consideration to the impact of organizational structures on decision making and policy formation. This paper fills this gap by developing a way of thinking about structures. I suggest that organizational structures act in ways very similar to the agendas legislatures use to guide their decision making. Using this metaphor, I develop several propositions about the impact of organizational structures on bure…
Putting one over on the boss
A Social Choice Perspective on Expertise and Authority in Bureaucracy
Research by social choice theorists has revealed much about the fundamental properties of institutions such as legislatures and voting systems. Almost no attention, however, has been paid to the properties of institutions such as bureaucracies. This essay attempts to lay the foundation for a social choice theory of bureaucracy. First, the properties of decentralized bureaucracies, which stress the importance of expertise in decision making, are i…
Judging Presidential Performance on House & Senate Roll Calls
How successful should we expect presidents to be in their relationships with the House and Senate? An answer to this question is central to making informed judgments about their effectiveness. Professors Hammond and Fraser show how quantitative and circumstance-sensitive standards for judging presidential performance can be developed. Applying these standards to presidents from Eisenhower to Carter, they suggest that the reputations of some of th…
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 c…
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's 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 Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
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 st…
Agenda Control, Organizational Structure, and Bureaucratic Politics
The literature on has not given adequate consideration to the impact of organizational structures on decision making and policy formation. This paper fills this gap by developing a way of thinking about structures. I suggest that organizational structures act in ways very similar to the agendas legislatures use to guide their decision making. Using this metaphor, I develop several propositions about the impact of organizational structures on bure…
In Defence of Luther Gulick's‘notes on the Theory of Organization
This article reviews a debate in public administration which occurred some 40 years ago between two giants of public administration, Luther Gulick and Herbert Simon. Simon is generally considered to have ‘won’ the debate in the 1940s and 195Os, and there is good reason to think that this ‘victory’ turned the field of public administration in a direction very different from where it had been headed previously. The paper makes two arguments. The fi…
A Social Choice Perspective on Expertise and Authority in Bureaucracy
Research by social choice theorists has revealed much about the fundamental properties of institutions such as legislatures and voting systems. Almost no attention, however, has been paid to the properties of institutions such as bureaucracies. This essay attempts to lay the foundation for a social choice theory of bureaucracy. First, the properties of decentralized bureaucracies, which stress the importance of expertise in decision making, are i…
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 president's choices for administrat…
The Deregulatory Snowball
Most theories of regulatory politics have a common implication: once regulations are in place, they are exceedingly difficult to remove. At best, a particular regulatory regime will remain stable for a long period of time; at worst, regulation will beget even more regulation. Given these theories the deregulation that has occurred in the American economy in the past decade is almost inexplicable. Several reasons have been suggested for this dereg…
Formal Theory and the Institutions of Governance
Understanding governance in the world's democracies requires study of the political institutions — the chief executives, the bureaucracies, and the legislatures — most involved in national policymaking. There are many approaches to the study of these institutions. This article examines the potential of an approach which is relatively unfamiliar to most students of governance: the development of formal mathematical theories of political institutio…
Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics
Efficient incentive-compatible schemes for resolving hidden action and hidden information problems have been shown to exist, thereby offering the hope that public goods can be provided in a neutral, non-political way. We argue that this hope is illusory. Such schemes inevitably generate a residual profit, and a property right to the residual creates a stake in inefficiency; the residual can be increased by a distortion of the efficient incentive …
Some Complex Answers to the Simple Question ‘Do Institutions Matter
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 an…
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…
Why Is the Intelligence Community So Difficult to Redesign? Smart Practices, Conflicting Goals, and the Creation of Purpose‐Based Organizations
The adoption of “smart practices” requires that smart practices can actually be identified for the areas of public policy in which we are interested. For the problem of designing structures for public agencies, however, identifying smart practices is not easy. This article explores the reasons for the substantial conservativism, lasting over 50 years, regarding the structural design of the U.S. intelligence community. One central argument is simp…
Toward A General Theory Of Hierarchy
Information processing and policymaking, in any kind of institution, involve the making of comparisons. For information processing, the comparisons are among bits of data. For policymaking, the comparisons are among alternative options. Many of our institutions are hierarchies, and this essay examines, for a wide range of institutions, how hierarchies structure the making of the comparisons
Committees and the core of the Constitution
Bicameralism and the Core
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…
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 c…
Another Look At the Role of "the Rules" in the 1972 Democratic Presidential Primaries
IN their article Primary Rules, Political Power and Social Change Lengle and Shafer1 have raised the problem of how primary rules affect the outcomes of the presidential nomination process of the Democratic party. That different rules enhance the fortunes of different candidates is probably something that practicing politicians have always known, but political scientists have not paid much attention to the problem. For their insights into the pro…
Rank injustice
Judging Presidential Performance on House & Senate Roll Calls
How successful should we expect presidents to be in their relationships with the House and Senate? An answer to this question is central to making informed judgments about their effectiveness. Professors Hammond and Fraser show how quantitative and circumstance-sensitive standards for judging presidential performance can be developed. Applying these standards to presidents from Eisenhower to Carter, they suggest that the reputations of some of th…
Learning in Hierarchies
The formal hierarchical structures of organizations can be expected to affect the organizations' behavior in many different ways. One kind of impact is that their structures may affect how their knowledge is organized. This is important because the different ways in which knowledge can be organized may affect what the organizations' decision makers learn from the information that their organizations have gathered, stored, and processed. However, …
Putting one over on the boss
What Roll Calls Should We Exclude from Conservative Coalition Calculations
Legislative roll-call analysts often exclude from consideration roll calls which show only minimal amounts of conflict. There is no agreement on what this minimal amount should be: some analysts exclude only unanimous roll calls, for example, while others exclude roll calls on which the minority receives as much as 20 percent of the total votes cast. When calculating the frequency with which assorted alliances-such as the in Congress-occur on rol…
Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies
Null Hypothesis Models in Legislative Studies
Moral hazard in work organizations
Another Look At the Role of "the Rules" in the 1972 Democratic Presidential Primaries
IN their article Primary Rules, Political Power and Social Change Lengle and Shafer1 have raised the problem of how primary rules affect the outcomes of the presidential nomination process of the Democratic party. That different rules enhance the fortunes of different candidates is probably something that practicing politicians have always known, but political scientists have not paid much attention to the problem. For their insights into the pro…
What Roll Calls Should We Exclude from Conservative Coalition Calculations
Legislative roll-call analysts often exclude from consideration roll calls which show only minimal amounts of conflict. There is no agreement on what this minimal amount should be: some analysts exclude only unanimous roll calls, for example, while others exclude roll calls on which the minority receives as much as 20 percent of the total votes cast. When calculating the frequency with which assorted alliances-such as the in Congress-occur on rol…
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 c…
Null Hypothesis Models in Legislative Studies
Judging Presidential Performance on House & Senate Roll Calls
How successful should we expect presidents to be in their relationships with the House and Senate? An answer to this question is central to making informed judgments about their effectiveness. Professors Hammond and Fraser show how quantitative and circumstance-sensitive standards for judging presidential performance can be developed. Applying these standards to presidents from Eisenhower to Carter, they suggest that the reputations of some of th…
Putting one over on the boss
A Social Choice Perspective on Expertise and Authority in Bureaucracy
Research by social choice theorists has revealed much about the fundamental properties of institutions such as legislatures and voting systems. Almost no attention, however, has been paid to the properties of institutions such as bureaucracies. This essay attempts to lay the foundation for a social choice theory of bureaucracy. First, the properties of decentralized bureaucracies, which stress the importance of expertise in decision making, are i…
Agenda Control, Organizational Structure, and Bureaucratic Politics
The literature on has not given adequate consideration to the impact of organizational structures on decision making and policy formation. This paper fills this gap by developing a way of thinking about structures. I suggest that organizational structures act in ways very similar to the agendas legislatures use to guide their decision making. Using this metaphor, I develop several propositions about the impact of organizational structures on bure…
Distant friends and nearby enemies
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 st…
The Deregulatory Snowball
Most theories of regulatory politics have a common implication: once regulations are in place, they are exceedingly difficult to remove. At best, a particular regulatory regime will remain stable for a long period of time; at worst, regulation will beget even more regulation. Given these theories the deregulation that has occurred in the American economy in the past decade is almost inexplicable. Several reasons have been suggested for this dereg…
Invisible decisive coalitions in large hierarchies
Committees and the core of the Constitution
In Defence of Luther Gulick's‘notes on the Theory of Organization
This article reviews a debate in public administration which occurred some 40 years ago between two giants of public administration, Luther Gulick and Herbert Simon. Simon is generally considered to have ‘won’ the debate in the 1940s and 195Os, and there is good reason to think that this ‘victory’ turned the field of public administration in a direction very different from where it had been headed previously. The paper makes two arguments. The fi…
Moral hazard in work organizations
Rethinking Allison's Models
The ideas in Graham Allison'sEssence of Decision(1971) have had an enormous impact on the study and teaching of bureaucracy and foreign policy making. While Allison's 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 Allison's three models to a systematic critical analysis. Our conclusion is that the models require substantial refor…
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 president's choices for administrat…
Toward A General Theory Of Hierarchy
Information processing and policymaking, in any kind of institution, involve the making of comparisons. For information processing, the comparisons are among bits of data. For policymaking, the comparisons are among alternative options. Many of our institutions are hierarchies, and this essay examines, for a wide range of institutions, how hierarchies structure the making of the comparisons
Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics
Efficient incentive-compatible schemes for resolving hidden action and hidden information problems have been shown to exist, thereby offering the hope that public goods can be provided in a neutral, non-political way. We argue that this hope is illusory. Such schemes inevitably generate a residual profit, and a property right to the residual creates a stake in inefficiency; the residual can be increased by a distortion of the efficient incentive …
Bicameralism and the Core
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…
Formal Theory and the Institutions of Governance
Understanding governance in the world's democracies requires study of the political institutions — the chief executives, the bureaucracies, and the legislatures — most involved in national policymaking. There are many approaches to the study of these institutions. This article examines the potential of an approach which is relatively unfamiliar to most students of governance: the development of formal mathematical theories of political institutio…
Some Complex Answers to the Simple Question ‘Do Institutions Matter
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 an…
Agenda Control, the Median Justice, and the Majority Opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court
Some scholars argue that the author of the majority opinion exercises the most influence over the Court's opinion‐writing process and so can determine what becomes Court policy, at least within the limits of what some Court majority finds acceptable. Other students of the Court have suggested that the Court's median justice effectively dictates the content of the majority opinion: whatever policy the median justice most wants, she can get. We tes…
Rank injustice
Learning in Hierarchies
The formal hierarchical structures of organizations can be expected to affect the organizations' behavior in many different ways. One kind of impact is that their structures may affect how their knowledge is organized. This is important because the different ways in which knowledge can be organized may affect what the organizations' decision makers learn from the information that their organizations have gathered, stored, and processed. However, …
Political science (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Law and economics (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Game Theory and Voting Systems (10 works) · Public Administration (9 works)