Mathew D Mccubbins
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 199898 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Mathew D Mccubbins |
| NOMBRES | Mathew D |
| APELLIDO | Mccubbins |
| FIRMA | MCCUBBINS M D |
| AFILIACIONES | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0606-2109 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 2328 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 49 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1983 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
The efficacy of measuring judicial ideal points
Fiscal Secession
Special assessments on property are a fiscal innovation employed by many local governments. Unable to raise property taxes due to limitations, localities have turned to these charges as an alternative method to fund local services. In this article, we seek to explain differential levels of special assessment financing through the analysis of property tax records of a sample of single-family homes in California. We theorize that special assessment…
Is political knowledge unique
Survey research shows that voters know very little about politics. Left unexamined is whether political knowledge is a distinct type of knowledge when compared to other subjects. We seek to establish a baseline by putting political knowledge into a broader context. We show that our respondents’ knowledge about politics is similar in construction to their knowledge about other subjects, such as shopping, sports, popular culture, geography, economi…
Coordination, Communication, and Information
Communication is central to solving coordination problems in politics. In this paper, we show that both the communication network and what people know about the network structure affect coordination. Increases in the number of connections between people make coordination easier and so does increasing the amount of information people have about the structure. We also demonstrate that highly connected nodes in the network can facilitate coordinatio…
Democracy’s Continuing Dilemma
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Constitutions of Exception
Constitutions of exception are commonplace legal regimes that prescribe conditions and procedures under which the constitution itself can be legally suspended. Often the suspension of the constitution involves the interruption of scheduled elections for the national legislature and/or the chief executive. Military participation in civilian government and the derogation of civil liberties and rights are also typical. There is a debate in the liter…
Against Game Theory
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those…
Knowledge and networks
Sex and the ballot box
Voters in many American states have considered important social policies that redefine civil liberties within their state through the initiative and referendum. An important question remaining is, are voters knowledgeable enough to make decisions on these social policies that have far-reaching effects? The common wisdom is that voters rely on information shortcuts in lieu of extensive knowledge about the issues. Unlike candidate elections, howeve…
State and Local Government Finance
The Great Recession that began in late 2007 had devastating consequences for the fiscal health of state and local governments, and many remain in a precarious financial position. Several cities have declared bankruptcy, and more will do so in coming years. The future, however, promises no long-term relief. Due primarily to the aging population of the United States, state and local governments are allocating large and increasing shares of their bu…
Agenda Control in the Israeli Knesset during Ariel Sharon's Second Government
How do multi-party coalition governments share agenda power? In principle, coalitions might allocate agenda power among their members by distributing special proposal rights, distributing special blocking rights, or both. The literature has prominent models embodying each polar possibility, with Laver and Shepsle's model envisaging that each party in a coalition has the ability to propose any bill(s) it wishes within the jurisdiction of a ministr…
The Blind Leading the Blind
We analyze whether and when polls help citizens to improve their decisions. Specifically, we use experiments to investigate (1) whether and when citizens are willing to obtain polls and (2) whether and when polls help citizens to make better choices than they would have made on their own. We find that citizens are more likely to obtain polls when the decisions they must make are difficult and when they are unsophisticated. Ironically, when the de…
Party Power or Preferences? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from American State Legislatures
Can majority parties control legislative outcomes by controlling the agenda, or are roll-call patterns simply the product of legislators’ preferences? We argue that, holding members’ preferences constant, the majority party’s ability to set the agenda gives it the power to influence legislative outcomes. We present the implications of this view of party power formally and then explore them empirically in two quasi-experiments from American state …
The Judiciary and the Role of Law
This article discusses the judiciary and the role of law. It talks about the implications of the approach for issues in statutory interpretation, and then examines the relationship between the legal and political controls of bureaucracy. The last section in the article focuses on the implications for judicial independence within the larger separation-of-powers system. The emerging literature on Positive Political Theory (PPT) further stresses the…
The Problem With Being Special
In the face of voter-imposed tax limitations, local governments have adopted ever-more complex financial mechanisms to balance their budgets. Increasingly, municipalities in California have made use of special assessments to finance local infrastructure improvements and other vital government services. These assessments bill property owners for public goods and services in proportion to the “special benefits” that they receive. Because benefit as…
Connected Coordination
Networks can affect a group’s ability to solve a coordination problem. We use laboratory experiments to study the conditions under which groups of participants can solve coordination games. We investigate a variety of different network structures, and we also investigate coordination games with symmetric and asymmetric payoffs. Our results show that network connections facilitate coordination in both symmetric and asymmetric games. Most significa…
When Voters Make Laws
Three challenges affect the use of initiatives and referendums concerning bonds to fund local infrastructure. First, public officials can often make take-it-or-leave-it offers to voters, conferring substantial power on the agenda setters and not necessarily leading to policy that the voters prefer. Second, initiatives are subject to sequential-elimination agendas that can result in suboptimal policy. This problem is compounded in local direct dem…
Agenda Power in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000
We present strong evidence that governing coalitions in Italy exercise significant negative agenda powers. First, governing parties have a roll rate that is nearly 0, and their roll rate is lower than opposition parties' roll rates, which average about 20% on all final‐passage votes. Second, after one controls for distance from the floor median, opposition parties have higher roll rates than government parties. These results strongly suggest that…
For Whom the TEL Tolls
Can voters stop state governments from spending at high rates through the enactment of tax and expenditure limits (TELs), or do these laws become dead letters? We draw upon the principal-agent literature to theorize that TELs—one of the most frequent uses of the initiative process across the country—might be circumvented by the sorts of elected officials who would inspire their passage. We test for the effectiveness of TELs across states using a …
Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, Volume 2
This work addresses the development of congressional practices and institutions and ties the changes to key political and economic events. In connecting political and economic events with changes in Congress, the authors examine the political economy of the history of Congress. They draw upon history to offer insights about contemporary issues such as party polarization, filibuster reform, direct election of politicians, intercameral bargaining, …
Legislative Leviathan
The second edition of Legislative Leviathan provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Re-evaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel'. These cartels seize the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and …
Agenda control in the Bundestag, 1980–2002
We find strong evidence of monopoly legislative agenda control by government parties in the Bundestag. First, the government parties have near-zero roll rates, while the opposition parties are often rolled over half the time. Second, only opposition parties’ (and not government parties’) roll rates increase with the distances of each party from the floor median. Third, almost all policy moves are towards the government coalition (the only excepti…
Setting the Agenda
Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves members' non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theor…
Lost in Translation
When Does Government Limit the Impact of Voter Initiatives? The Politics of Implementation and Enforcement
In many states and localities, citizens make laws by initiative. Many winning initiatives, however, are later ignored or altered substantially. Why? Our answer emerges from two underappreciated aspects of the initiative process. First, many initiatives contain policies that powerful governmental actors once prevented from passing via traditional legislative channels. Second, implementation can require these actors to comply with policies they onc…
Congressional Oversight Overlooked
Scholars have often remarked that Congress neglects its oversight responsibility. We argue that Congress does no such thing: what appears to be a neglect of oversight really is the rational preference for one form of oversight-which we call fire-alarm oversight-over another form-police-patrol oversight. Our analysis supports a somewhat neglected way of looking at the strategies by which legislators seek to achieve their goals
Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game
Spatial models of electoral competition typically simplify the analysis by ignoring the question of internal constituency politics: constituencies are modeled simply as a distribution of ideal points along a set of issue dimensions. Matters related to the stability of divergent electoral coalitions have rarely been addressed. We explicitly take into account how differential rates of support by various groups in a constituency will influence candi…
A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion
A major issue in the study of American politics is the extent to which electoral discipline also constrains bureaucrats. In practice, executive agencies operate with considerable independence from elected officials. However,the entire process of policy execution is a game among legislators.the chief executive. and bureaucratic agents. It includes the initial delegation of authority, the choice of policy alternatives,and opportunities for oversigh…
The Legislative Design of Regulatory Structure
Studies of Congress and the design of regulation have focused largely upon the origins of regulation and upon the motivations underlying the congressional delegation of legislative authority to administrative agencies. In studying the delegation of legislative authority, however, little attention has been paid to how Congress exercises control over the subsequent bureaucratic selection of regulatory policy. This paper focuses on the how by develo…
Agenda Power in Brazil's Câmara Dos Deputados, 1989–98
This article examines a general proposition about democratic legislatures—that their agenda will be cartelized by any majority government—in the context of a case study of the Brazilian Camara dos Deputados (Chamber of Deputies). The main question is to identify when consistent agenda control by a single majority coalition, as opposed to agenda control by shifting majorities, has emerged in the post-1988 Camara. Consistent agenda control emerges …
Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions
We investigate the extent to which possession of the veto allows the president to influence congressional decisions regarding regular annual appropriations legislation. The most important implication of our analysis is that the influence the veto conveys is asymmetrical: it allows the president to restrain Congress when he prefers to appropriate less to an agency than they do; it does not provide him an effective means of extracting higher approp…
Party Power or Preferences? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from American State Legislatures
Can majority parties control legislative outcomes by controlling the agenda, or are roll-call patterns simply the product of legislators’ preferences? We argue that, holding members’ preferences constant, the majority party’s ability to set the agenda gives it the power to influence legislative outcomes. We present the implications of this view of party power formally and then explore them empirically in two quasi-experiments from American state …
Representation or abdication? How citizens use institutions to help delegation succeed
Modern democracy requires delegation. One problem with delegation is that principals and agents often have conflicting interests. A second problem is that principals lack information about their agents. Many scholars conclude that these problems cause delegation to become abdication. We reject this conclusion and introduce a theory of delegation that supports a different conclusion. The theory clarifies when interest conflicts and information pro…
Congressional Appropriations and the Electoral Connection
Congressional scholars have frequently reported dramatic shifts in the mood of Congress toward federal spending. In seeking to explain these fluctuations in congressional moods, we develop and estimate an "electoral connection" model of the congressional appropriations process. In this model appropriations decisions are seen to be the product of the responses of reelection-seeking members of Congress to the key political and economic variables in…
Bonding, Structure, and the Stability of Political Parties
The public policy benefits that parties-deliver are allocated by democratic procedures that devolve ultimately to majority rule. Majority-rule decision making, however, does not lead to consistent policy choices; it is "unstable." In this paper, we argue that institutions - and thereby policy coalitions -- can be stabilized by extra-legislative organization. The rules of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives dictate that a re…
Toward a Theory of Legislative Rules Changes
Eric Schickler and Andrew Rich (henceforth S and R) provide a valuable review of attempts to change selected rules of the United States House of Representatives, interpreting their findings against the backdrop of two theoretical approaches-one that emphasizes the role of the majority party in structuring House decisions (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994), and one that emphasizes the importance of cross-party alliances, hence of the House as a whole,…
For Whom the TEL Tolls
Can voters stop state governments from spending at high rates through the enactment of tax and expenditure limits (TELs), or do these laws become dead letters? We draw upon the principal-agent literature to theorize that TELs—one of the most frequent uses of the initiative process across the country—might be circumvented by the sorts of elected officials who would inspire their passage. We test for the effectiveness of TELs across states using a …
When Does Government Limit the Impact of Voter Initiatives? The Politics of Implementation and Enforcement
In many states and localities, citizens make laws by initiative. Many winning initiatives, however, are later ignored or altered substantially. Why? Our answer emerges from two underappreciated aspects of the initiative process. First, many initiatives contain policies that powerful governmental actors once prevented from passing via traditional legislative channels. Second, implementation can require these actors to comply with policies they onc…
Who Controls? Information and the Structure of Legislative Decision Making
Legislatures around the world first delegate some of their policy making authority to experts and then accept their delegates' proposals without question or amendment. Many scholars see this combination of events as evidence that complexity lead elected representatives to lose control of the actions of government. While we agree that complexity and delegation can render legislatures powerless, we argue that legislators around the world can, and d…
Setting the Agenda
Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves members' non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theor…
State and Local Government Finance
The Great Recession that began in late 2007 had devastating consequences for the fiscal health of state and local governments, and many remain in a precarious financial position. Several cities have declared bankruptcy, and more will do so in coming years. The future, however, promises no long-term relief. Due primarily to the aging population of the United States, state and local governments are allocating large and increasing shares of their bu…
Agenda Power in the Japanese House of Representatives
In this paper we provide evidence from Japan that bears on a general theory of agenda power in legislatures. By agenda power we mean the power to determine: (a) which bills are considered in the plenary session of the legislature and (b) restrictions on debate and amendment to these bills, when they are considered. While a substantial amount of work has focused on the second category of agenda power, including studies of special rules in the US H…
The Blind Leading the Blind
We analyze whether and when polls help citizens to improve their decisions. Specifically, we use experiments to investigate (1) whether and when citizens are willing to obtain polls and (2) whether and when polls help citizens to make better choices than they would have made on their own. We find that citizens are more likely to obtain polls when the decisions they must make are difficult and when they are unsophisticated. Ironically, when the de…
On the Decline of Party Voting in Congress
Appropriations Decisions as a Bilateral Bargaining Game between President and Congress
In this essay we model appropriations decisions as products of a bilateral bargaining game between a reelection-minded president and Congress. The findings bear out the expectation that the two sides jointly pursue a strategy of accommodation. In awarding appropriations, Congress takes into account the president's preferences embodied in the OMB's budget requests; these requests in turn reflected expectations of congressional action. The evidence…
Agenda Power in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1988–2000
We present strong evidence that governing coalitions in Italy exercise significant negative agenda powers. First, governing parties have a roll rate that is nearly 0, and their roll rate is lower than opposition parties' roll rates, which average about 20% on all final‐passage votes. Second, after one controls for distance from the floor median, opposition parties have higher roll rates than government parties. These results strongly suggest that…
Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism in the Policy Arena
Agenda Control in the Israeli Knesset during Ariel Sharon's Second Government
How do multi-party coalition governments share agenda power? In principle, coalitions might allocate agenda power among their members by distributing special proposal rights, distributing special blocking rights, or both. The literature has prominent models embodying each polar possibility, with Laver and Shepsle's model envisaging that each party in a coalition has the ability to propose any bill(s) it wishes within the jurisdiction of a ministr…
As a Matter of Factions
For 38 years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained single-party control over the Japanese government.This lack of partisan turnover in government has frustrated attempts to explain Japanese government policy changes using political variables.In this paper, we look for intraparty changes that may have led to changes in Japanese budgetary policy.Using a simple model of agenda-setting, we hypothesize that changes in which intraparty faction…
Agenda control in the Bundestag, 1980–2002
We find strong evidence of monopoly legislative agenda control by government parties in the Bundestag. First, the government parties have near-zero roll rates, while the opposition parties are often rolled over half the time. Second, only opposition parties’ (and not government parties’) roll rates increase with the distances of each party from the floor median. Third, almost all policy moves are towards the government coalition (the only excepti…
Policy Components of Arms Competition
This report suggests and justifies a simple approach to arms competitions, wherein arms competitions are viewed as disaggregated competition between pairs of weapons systems for executing mutually incompatible policy goals. This approach is derived from a decision theoretic model of armament choice, in which military decision makers make trade-offs between alternative strategies of weapons deployment to achieve national foreign policy objectives.…
Congressional Oversight Overlooked
Scholars have often remarked that Congress neglects its oversight responsibility. We argue that Congress does no such thing: what appears to be a neglect of oversight really is the rational preference for one form of oversight-which we call fire-alarm oversight-over another form-police-patrol oversight. Our analysis supports a somewhat neglected way of looking at the strategies by which legislators seek to achieve their goals
The politics of flatland
Congressional Appropriations and the Electoral Connection
Congressional scholars have frequently reported dramatic shifts in the mood of Congress toward federal spending. In seeking to explain these fluctuations in congressional moods, we develop and estimate an "electoral connection" model of the congressional appropriations process. In this model appropriations decisions are seen to be the product of the responses of reelection-seeking members of Congress to the key political and economic variables in…
Appropriations Decisions as a Bilateral Bargaining Game between President and Congress
In this essay we model appropriations decisions as products of a bilateral bargaining game between a reelection-minded president and Congress. The findings bear out the expectation that the two sides jointly pursue a strategy of accommodation. In awarding appropriations, Congress takes into account the president's preferences embodied in the OMB's budget requests; these requests in turn reflected expectations of congressional action. The evidence…
The Legislative Design of Regulatory Structure
Studies of Congress and the design of regulation have focused largely upon the origins of regulation and upon the motivations underlying the congressional delegation of legislative authority to administrative agencies. In studying the delegation of legislative authority, however, little attention has been paid to how Congress exercises control over the subsequent bureaucratic selection of regulatory policy. This paper focuses on the how by develo…
The congressional foundations of agency performance
Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game
Spatial models of electoral competition typically simplify the analysis by ignoring the question of internal constituency politics: constituencies are modeled simply as a distribution of ideal points along a set of issue dimensions. Matters related to the stability of divergent electoral coalitions have rarely been addressed. We explicitly take into account how differential rates of support by various groups in a constituency will influence candi…
A game-theoretic model of the appropriations process
Presidential Influence on Congressional Appropriations Decisions
We investigate the extent to which possession of the veto allows the president to influence congressional decisions regarding regular annual appropriations legislation. The most important implication of our analysis is that the influence the veto conveys is asymmetrical: it allows the president to restrain Congress when he prefers to appropriate less to an agency than they do; it does not provide him an effective means of extracting higher approp…
Congress, the Courts, and Public Policy
Examines the consequences of the one man, one vote rule in congress, the courts and public policy. Analysis of the court-ordered congressional redistricting in the United States House of Representatives based on the one man, one vote rule; Policy changes attributable to the one man, one vote rule
A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion
A major issue in the study of American politics is the extent to which electoral discipline also constrains bureaucrats. In practice, executive agencies operate with considerable independence from elected officials. However,the entire process of policy execution is a game among legislators.the chief executive. and bureaucratic agents. It includes the initial delegation of authority, the choice of policy alternatives,and opportunities for oversigh…
On the Decline of Party Voting in Congress
Learning From Oversight
Arthur Lupia, Mathew D McCubbins; Learning From Oversight: Fire Alarms and Police Patrols Reconstructed, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, V
Legislative Leviathan
Bonding, Structure, and the Stability of Political Parties
The public policy benefits that parties-deliver are allocated by democratic procedures that devolve ultimately to majority rule. Majority-rule decision making, however, does not lead to consistent policy choices; it is "unstable." In this paper, we argue that institutions - and thereby policy coalitions -- can be stabilized by extra-legislative organization. The rules of the Democratic Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives dictate that a re…
Who Controls? Information and the Structure of Legislative Decision Making
Legislatures around the world first delegate some of their policy making authority to experts and then accept their delegates' proposals without question or amendment. Many scholars see this combination of events as evidence that complexity lead elected representatives to lose control of the actions of government. While we agree that complexity and delegation can render legislatures powerless, we argue that legislators around the world can, and d…
Structure and Policy in Japan and the United States
1. Introduction Peter Cowhey and Mathew D. McCubbins Part I. Structure and Politics: 2. The structural determinants of electoral cohesiveness: England Japan and the United States Gary W. Cox and Frances M. Rosenbluth 3. Party provision for personal politics: dividing the vote in Japan Mathew D. McCubbins and Frances M. Rosenbluth 4. The appearance of power: legislators bureaucrats and the budget process in the United States and Japan Mathew D. Mc…
As a Matter of Factions
For 38 years, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) maintained single-party control over the Japanese government.This lack of partisan turnover in government has frustrated attempts to explain Japanese government policy changes using political variables.In this paper, we look for intraparty changes that may have led to changes in Japanese budgetary policy.Using a simple model of agenda-setting, we hypothesize that changes in which intraparty faction…
Toward a Theory of Legislative Rules Changes
Eric Schickler and Andrew Rich (henceforth S and R) provide a valuable review of attempts to change selected rules of the United States House of Representatives, interpreting their findings against the backdrop of two theoretical approaches-one that emphasizes the role of the majority party in structuring House decisions (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 1994), and one that emphasizes the importance of cross-party alliances, hence of the House as a whole,…
Elements of Reason
Many social scientists want to explain why people do what they do. A barrier to constructing such explanations used to be a lack of information on the relationship between cognition and choice. Now, recent advances in cognitive science, economics, political science, and psychology have clarified this relationship. In Elements of Reason, eighteen scholars from across the social sciences use these advances to uncover the cognitive foundations of so…
Agenda Power in the Japanese House of Representatives
In this paper we provide evidence from Japan that bears on a general theory of agenda power in legislatures. By agenda power we mean the power to determine: (a) which bills are considered in the plenary session of the legislature and (b) restrictions on debate and amendment to these bills, when they are considered. While a substantial amount of work has focused on the second category of agenda power, including studies of special rules in the US H…
Representation or abdication? How citizens use institutions to help delegation succeed
Modern democracy requires delegation. One problem with delegation is that principals and agents often have conflicting interests. A second problem is that principals lack information about their agents. Many scholars conclude that these problems cause delegation to become abdication. We reject this conclusion and introduce a theory of delegation that supports a different conclusion. The theory clarifies when interest conflicts and information pro…
Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism in the Policy Arena
A response to Austen-Smith
Political science (46 obras) · Law (37 obras) · Economics (35 obras) · Politics (31 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (25 obras) · Computer Science (24 obras) · Public Administration (23 obras) · Public Administration (19 obras) · Law and economics (18 obras)