Information and Legislative Organization

Multiple Referrals and Multidimensional Cheap Talk

“…Austen- Smith [1993], actually, is the only work that addresses the problem. Austen-Smith has a modelling approach that is completely di®erent from the one described here and employed in other papers (Gilligan and Krehbiel [1987], Epstein 14 We will be more precise on this later, for now note that one point in < 2 is represented by the two coordinates of some coordinate system, each coordinate is a dimension of the policy space 15 Although we do not study the choice of specialization in information production (as Austen-Smith does), we con¯rm Austen Smith intuition that experts will be in°uential only on some dimension of the policy space and therefore will argue on \orthogonal issues". Another work on information transmission in a multidimensional setting is Milgrom and Roberts [1986].…”

“…The more extreme are the preferences of a committee specialist relative to preferences of a non specialist in the legislature, the less informative is the committee ...the outlier principle is the most robust property of legislative signalling models. (Krehbiel [1991], p 81) lier principle". For example, although Krehbiel [1991]¯nds that many committees have no signi¯cant ideological bias relative to the°oor 9 , he also¯nds that one third of the committees has statistically signi¯cant ideological bias 10 : Foreign A®airs, Education and Labor, Post O±ce and Civil Service, Armed Services, District of Columbia.…”

“…(Krehbiel [1991], p 81) lier principle". For example, although Krehbiel [1991]¯nds that many committees have no signi¯cant ideological bias relative to the°oor 9 , he also¯nds that one third of the committees has statistically signi¯cant ideological bias 10 : Foreign A®airs, Education and Labor, Post O±ce and Civil Service, Armed Services, District of Columbia. The results of the empirical work of Londregan and Snyder [1994] are pretty drastic:…”

“…More generally, to the extent that we may divide the policy space along dimensions, this approach allows us to discuss the issue of the allocation of jurisdictions and decision power. A government, in fact, is a set of agents and interacting rules designed to take decisions in multi-dimensional policy spaces 15 ; similarly, a committee in the Congress is not a single agent, but a set of agents with a collective internal organization. The importance of the organization is strictly related to the multidimensionality of the policy space .…”

Comissões e partidos políticos na Câmara dos Deputados: um estudo sobre os padrões partidários de recrutamento para as comissões permanentes

“…Resumida por Keith Krehbiel (1991), a linha informacional argumenta que, quando o pêndulo da assimetria de informações entre plenário e comissões favorece estas últimas, há um destaque do seu papel no processo legiferante. Sendo assim, a permanência em determinada comissão geraria parlamentares especializados, reforçando o poder das comissões em relação ao plenário e constrangendo os partidos através da regra de seniority, uma vez que a violação desta poderia acarretar "incerteza" ao plenário no que diz respeito aos possíveis resultados de determinada legislação.…”