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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
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|Has article title=A Rational Choice Perspective on Congressional Norms
|Has author=Weingast, B.
|Has year=1979
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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==
