Decision Rules and Policy Outcomes

Abstract

Contemporary political science is rightly concerned with the complex relationship between the political process and the public policies in which it results. In understanding this relationship, it may be useful to distinguish two complementary aspects of the political process: (1) those which are relevant because they account for the policy preferences of elite-members and, (2) those elements, like voting and bargaining, which are of interest because they determine policy outcomes from given configurations of elite preferences. This paper offers a theoretical model for an important component of this second aspect: it is explicitly addressed to legislative voting processes and the underlying strategies of legislators as these contribute to the determination of policy outcomes. And, for the present, we take preference-formation as given.