Auctioning off the Agenda:
Bargaining in Legislatures with Endogenous Scheduling
(with Jernej Copic)
Caltech Social Science Working Paper #1266. There are
many examples of allocation problems where the final
allocation affects more than one agent, but the models
developed to study them typically allow for side
payments between agent. However, there are political
economy applications where it is hard to imagine
monetary transfers between the agents, at least not
legal ones. In this paper we propose a general
political economic framework for the study of
allocation problems with externalities without side
payments. We consider a setup with complete information
and we formulate the problem as one where the status
quo describes an initial allocation that can altered in
a sequence of proposals. The number of these proposals
is restricted. In the context of our main application,
bidding for slots on a legislative agenda, such
restriction can be interpreted as scarcity of plenary
time for considering the possible bills to move the
policy. The intuition for our model comes out of
framing the problem as a special type of a multi-good
auction. We show that equilibria generically exist
within the general model.
Caltech Social Science Working Paper #1267R. Since the
passage of he “Help America Vote Act” in 2002, nearly
half of the states have adopted a variety of new
identification requirements for voter registration and
participation by the 2006 general election. There has
been little analysis of whether these requirements
reduce voter participation, espe- cially among certain
classes of voters. In this paper we document the effect
of voter identification requirements on registered
voters as they were imposed in states in the 2000 and
2004 presidential elections, and in the 2002 and 2006
midterm elections. Looking first at trends in the
aggregate data, we find no evidence that voter
identification requirements reduce participation. Using
individual-level data from the Current Population
Survey across these elections, however, we find that
the strictest forms of voter identification re-
quirements — combination requirements of presenting an
identification card and positively matching one’s
signature with a signature either on file or on the
identification card, as well as requirements to show
picture identification — have a negative impact on the
participation of registered voters relative to the
weakest requirement, stating one’s name. We also find
find evidence that the stricter voter identification
requirements depress turnout to a greater ex- tent for
less educated and lower income populations, but no
racial differences.