A comparison of rational choice models of Congress

Legislatures are arguably the most important political institution in modern democracies. The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, written by some of the most distinguished legislative scholars in political science, provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description and critical assessment of the state of the art in this key area.

This book examines the notion that while states may differ in terms of ideology, economic system, and institutional architecture, their role as an organizing framework for system-wide political action and international relations is contingent on a series of competing and oftentimes mutually exclusive factors. This work clarifies factors that contribute to our understanding of the critical roles of systemic and sub-systemic elements of society and how they reinforce the reciprocal problems of human and social organizations, and the institutionalization processes that help to constrain them.

The human condition teems with institutions – intertemporal social arrangements that shape human relations in support of particular values – and the social scientific work developed over the last five decades aimed at understanding them is similarly vast and diverse. This book synthesizes scholarship from across the social sciences, with special focus on political science, sociology, economics, and organizational studies. Drawing out institutions' essentially social and temporal qualities and their varying relationships to efficiency and power, the authors identify more underlying similarity in understandings of institutional origins, maintenance, and change than emerges from overviews from within any given disciplinary tradition. Most importantly, Theories of Institutions identifies dozens of avenues for cross-fertilization, the pursuit of which can help keep this broad and inherently diverse field of study vibrant for future generations of scholars.

This book evaluates the legislative effectiveness of Nigeria’s National Assembly under the Fourth Republic. The assessment covers five Assemblies (4th–8th) and focuses specifically on lawmaking, cost of running the National Assembly, and the budget making process. It empirically assesses the effectiveness of the Nigerian national legislature beyond previous emotional and sentimental evaluations of the institution. It has developed a model ‘Institutional Legislative Effectiveness Score’ used in assessing the institutional performance of the National Assembly from two perspectives: first, by comparing the performances of the two chambers in the same Assembly; and second, by comparing the performances of the institution across Assemblies. Aside lawmaking, the book also covers the major topical issues that characterized public evaluation of the institution. These include: size of the institution, budgeting process, cost of funding the institution, and the debate on the appropriate way in reforming the National Assembly.

The campaign finance system regulates campaign contributions and behavior with the intent to eliminate corruption or the potential for corruption in elections. With that goal in mind, state legislators created statutes regulating campaign behavior. Each state has wide variation in the complexity of campaign finance regulations. Regulatory systems create a network of rules and regulations and campaign finance is no different. The difference is in the behavior regulated and the potential negative impacts of a complex regulatory system. Candidates running for office must take time and effort to learn and comply with campaign finance regulations to compete in an election. If campaign finance regulations are complex, the time and effort required to learn and comply increases and has the potential to take candidates away from campaigning. This book studies whether states with complex regulations have fewer candidates running for office or more candidates withdrawing their candidacy after starting a campaign. This potentially negative consequence of campaign regulations impacts participation rates for individuals running for office. In a democracy, we desire more candidates in order to maintain a diverse candidate pool, but a complex regulatory system may adversely affect that goal by increasing candidate costs.

What explains the great variability in economic growth and political development across countries? Institutional and organizational analysis has developed since the 1970s into a powerful toolkit, which argues that institutions and norms rather than geography, culture, or technology are the primary causes of sustainable development. Institutions are rules that recognized authorities create and enforce. Norms are rules created by long-standing patterns of behavior, shared by people in a society or organization. They combine to play a role in all organizations, including governments, firms, churches, universities, gangs, and even families. This introduction to the concepts and applications of institutional and organizational analysis uses economic history, economics, law, and political science to inform its theoretical framework. Institutional and organizational analysis becomes the basis to show why the economic and political performance of countries worldwide have not converged, and reveals the lessons to be learned from it for business, law, and public policy.