High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. Focusing on this fact, we provide microfoundations for judicial preferences over legal rules by deriving them directly from expectations about the distribution of future cases. Doing so has important consequences: in contrast to standard assumptions in models of judicial decision-making, preferences over legal rules are asymmetric rather than symmetric. We demonstrate that this has significant implications for judicial decision-making on collegial courts. Finally, we show that changes in the case distribution—for example, as a result of technological change—can lead to significant legal change, even in the absence of ideological or doctrinal change on the court.

Party elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the bargains parties strike. Because most supporters are unaware of the complex aspects of bargains and instead rely on simple heuristics to evaluate their most visible features, parties have incentives to meet supporter expectations primarily on easily observable outcomes. To do so, they make trade-offs on less observable outcomes. This implies that the more visible features of a bargain typically do not accurately reflect the relative success of parties in coalition negotiations. We evaluate our argument using original data on the office rewards and policy risks of portfolio allocation in 16 parliamentary democracies. Our findings support our argument, and they have important implications for the nature of representation under multiparty government.

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

We appreciate the positive reception of our transformation by Benoit and Laver (hereafter, BL), and we are grateful that they have incorporated it into the Wordscores package. Because their comment highlights a fundamental difference between the Martin-Vanberg (MV) and Laver-Benoit-Garry (LBG) approaches that is critical to the choice among transformations, we offer some brief comments that will allow users to make an informed decision regarding the appropriate use of the transformations. The central issue concerns comparisons between reference and virgin texts. As BL point out, researchers will often be interested in making such comparisons, and the LBG and MV transformations can yield substantially different results. In light of these differences, BL's primary suggestion is to focus analysis on the raw scores, which can be obtained for reference as well as virgin texts. We wholeheartedly agree with this prescription. In fact, it is precisely a concern for faithfully reporting the raw score information, while making it more intuitive, that motivates the MV transformation. As we show below, the MV transformation accurately reflects all and nothing but the information contained in raw scores. Therefore, “users [who] get eye strain” by looking at raw scores can safely substitute MV scores and be confident that the information provided is equivalent. The same will typically not be true of LBG scores.

In a recent article in the American Political Science Review, Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, “Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data,” 97:311—331) propose a new method for conducting content analysis. Their Wordscores approach, by automating text-coding procedures, represents an advance in content analysis that will potentially have a large long-term impact on research across the discipline. To allow substantive interpretation, the scores produced by the Wordscores procedure require transformation. In this note, we address several shortcomings in the transformation procedure introduced in the original program. We demonstrate that the original transformation distorts the metric on which content scores are placed—hindering the ability of scholars to make meaningful comparisons across texts—and that it is very sensitive to the texts that are scored—opening up the possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertently or not, results that depend on the texts they choose to include in their analyses. We propose a transformation procedure that solves these problems.

Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by “agency” problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that the process of legislative review presents an important—but understudied—institutional opportunity for coalition partners to overcome these tensions. We evaluate our argument using original legislative data on over 300 government bills collected from two parliamentary democracies. The central implication of our findings is that legislatures play a more important role in parliamentary democracies than is usually appreciated by providing a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition partners with divergent preferences to govern successfully.