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Weingast, B. (1979), A Rational Choice Perspective on Congressional Norms (view source)
Revision as of 19:15, 29 September 2020
, 19:15, 29 September 2020no edit summary
{{Article
|Has page=Weingast, B. (1979), A Rational Choice Perspective on Congressional Norms
|Has bibtex key=
|Has article title=A Rational Choice Perspective on Congressional Norms
|Has author=Weingast, B.
|Has year=1979
|In journal=
|In volume=
|In number=
|Has pages=
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Download the paper as a [http://www.edegan.com/pdfs/Weingast%20(1979)%20-%20A%20Rational%20Choice%20Perspective%20on%20Congressional%20Norms.pdf pdf]
The author notes that lots of formal models of legislatures suggest that "minimum winning coalitions" should prevail. Ie, the winning coalition will have a size of 50% of the total legislators, plus one. This should happen because the majority should attempt to divide the benefits of a project to as few members as possible while still having enough votes to pass a majority vote on the project.
This never seems to appear in real life: Winning coalitions are often much larger than 50%. The paper's goal is to develop a formal model to explain these larger margins. The author achieves this by modeling the "informal rules" seen in Congress within the formal game theoretic setup. The author shows how legislative rules that lead to large majorities are better for legislators than rules that lead to smaller majorities -- thus suggesting how such rules could come about endogenously.
==Model Setup==
From here the author studies the relaxation of the <math>b>c</math> assumption.
* First he shows the conditions under which legislators will propose their project --assuming that all other legislators are proposing theirs.
* Then the author discusses the notion that <math>b/c</math> is decreasing over time -- so that the "worthwhile" projects are used early in the game, and the bad ones will continue later. The author notes that at some point, pork is no longer rational for the legislators and voters. However, this happens sooner in the majority rule than the universal rule. The results suggest that "pork" will
