Patients, Doctors, and Legislators

Patients, doctors, and legislators.

A I prepared to examine a new patient, “B,” I commented on her lovely necklace. B told me that her mother had given it to her more than 20 years ago, when she was diagnosed with a serious medical condition. “Oh?” I asked. My curiosity was piqued—B hadn’t reported any important family history. Her mother, it turned out, had Huntington’s disease. The necklace was a gift, given before her mother d...

Patients and Their Doctors

Patients and Doctors

Lobbyists, Relationships, and Legislators’ Votes

For lobbyists, success is about who you know rather than what you know. Forming and maintaining relationships with legislators is key to public policy success for interest groups and lobbyists. In this paper, I examine how to operationalize the relationship between a legislator and a lobbyist. Disclosure forms on gifts may be a way to operationalize the relationships between legislators and lob...

Legislators' Patterns of Cooperation

This study attempts to identify the patterns of cooperation between legislators. We argue that if legislators decide to cooperate, they prefer to do so first with their colleagues who share similar affiliations and then across affiliations. In order to examine this hypothesis, we devised a unique cooperation scale and tested it using a sample of the private member bills that were initiated in t...