Legislators use public communication to define the type of representation they provide constituents. This chapter characterizes how legislators define the type of representation they provide to constituents and shows how this definition of representation changes in response to shifts in electoral pressure and changes in party control of Congress. To demonstrate this change, I use a large collec...

We examine a legislative voting game where decisions are to be made over both ideological and distributive dimensions. In equilibrium legislators prefer to make proposals for the two dimensions together, despite having preferences that are separable over the two dimensions. The equilibria exhibit interaction between the ideological and distributive dimensions, and the set of legislators who app...

This paper models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods, showing how he can exploit a legislature (completely) in the first period by promising future benefits to legislators who support him. In equilibrium, a large majority of legislators vote for the firstperiod proposal because they thereby maintain the chance of belonging to the minimum winning coalition in th...

Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators’ goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis ...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We sho...

This paper shows why a majority of legislators may vote for a policy that benefits a firm but harms all legislators. The firm may induce legislators to support the policy by suggesting that it is more likely to invest in a district whose voters or representative support the policy. In equilibrium, no one vote may be decisive, so each legislator who seeks the firm’s investment votes for the poli...

Legislators sometimes pass unrelated issues in one bill with one vote (omnibus bills), but they often vote separately on different issues as well. In this paper, I consider a model in which the first mover chooses whether to bargain over an omnibus bill or several separate bills. The main difference between the two types of bills is that trade-offs between issues are possible with omnibus bills...