Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock 's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996's level (e.g., Krehbiel , 1998 and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999;Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions-incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence-and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices.

Unilateral presidential actions, such as executive orders, are widely cited as a key strategic tool for presidential power. However, is unilateral action evidence of unilateralism or might it represent executive acquiescence? We answer this by (1) specifying three competing models, each with a different presidential discretion assumption and generating alternative hypotheses; (2) extending the canonical item-response model to best measure executive-order significance; and (3) comparing competing theoretical models to data for . Theoretically, we show that legislative preferences may impact unilateral actions differently than previously thought and indicate how parties may be influential. Empirically, a model where the president is responsive to the chamber's majority-party median fits the data better than models assuming responsiveness to the chamber median or no presidential acquiescence. Unilateral action appears not tantamount to presidential power, as evidence implies that legislative parties, or the judicial actors enforcing their will, are key conditioning factors.

While contemporary scholars generally view the Senate’s nominee approval role as impacting bureaucratic capacities and the president’s ability to realize campaign pledges, empiricists and theorists focus on different elements of bargaining. Since empiricists typically study confirmation delays, and theorists normally analyze equilibrium nomination preferences, theory and data rarely inform one another. We remedy this by specifying an executive appointment model jointly incorporating delays and appointee ideologies. Besides predicting appointees’ equilibrium ideologies, and contrary to past claims about the relationship between ideology and duration, this theory details how ideological differences between the president and his opposition do not straightforwardly induce longer delays; rather, effects are conditioned by factors such as the office’s policy importance and divided government. Additionally, different pathways for parties to impact appointee ideology and duration are flexibly incorporated. Empirically, theoretical hypotheses receive support and evidence of parties impacting Senate trade-offs between delay and policy outcomes and successfully pressuring key members over high-stakes appointments are uncovered.

Committee coordinators face a classic delegation problem when assigning reports to their committee members. Although a few theoretical developments have focused on the effects of expertise on delegation, empirical studies have commonly assumed monotonic effects. Based on existing informational models, we argue that a more loyal committee member, everything else being equal, is more likely to be appointed as a rapporteur and that more expertise, holding preference divergence constant, has a non-monotonic effect because of informational credibility. Employing accumulated committee service as an expertise measure, these theoretical expectations are tested on all committee report delegations in the European Parliament from 1979 to 2014. Our empirical analysis with non-parametric and parametric hierarchical conditional logit models renders strong support for these expectations. The results hold across member states, political groups, procedures, committees and over time.

Recent years have witnessed many efforts to understand legislative productivity and gridlock. However, despite theoretical and empirical contributions to how preferences and institutions shape political gridlock 's level (e.g., Krehbiel 1996's level (e.g., Krehbiel , 1998 and empirical evidence about how parties may affect political gridlock (e.g., Binder 1999;Coleman 1999), we lack a comprehensive perspective theoretically and empirically examining preferences, institutions, and parties. We overcome this deficiency by modeling conditions for gridlock as a function of preferences and institutions-incorporating bicameralism and presidential influence-and of parties. By generating equilibrium gridlock intervals for empirical testing using Poole's (1998) common space scores, and showing that gridlock intervals associated with models in which parties have no effect or an agenda-setting role do not explain policy gridlock but that those linked to models with party-unity effects and strong presidential leadership do, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for party and leadership roles in explaining legislative choices. ).Thanks to Keith Krehbiel, Adam Meirowitz, research seminar participants at Princeton University, anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and to Keith Poole for generously furnishing data and providing guidance.1 Some confirm that productivity is invariant to factors such as divided government (e.g., Jones 1997; Quirk and Nesmith 1995), and others develop different measures of significant legislation and find some empirical evidence that divided government matters (e.g., Kelly 1993;Binder 1999;Howell et al. 2000).Despite these developments, a theoretical and corresponding empirical analysis examining whether the "pivotal politics" or the partisan approach better explains the extent of gridlock is lacking. Preference-based theory does not seriously integrate parties, and partisan-oriented empirical work lacks the theoretical foundation that the preference-based approach provides and may, as a result, miss essential features of gridlock.Our analysis builds on previous works theoretically and empirically by linking preferences, institutions, and parties. Theoretically, we make Krehbiel's model more realistic by incorporating bicameralism, integrating different roles for political parties, including that of the president as its leader, and deriving appropriate equilibrium gridlock intervals (EGIs). Empirically, we test whether EGIs for different models matter for postwar legislative productivity, improving past research in several waysnotably by using Poole's (1998) common space scores to provide a common, preference-based, metric for House members, Senators, and presidents-and find that models with party discipline work much better than those with preferences alone.