Alan Wiseman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Office: 2186A Derby Hall
154 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210
(614) 292-8196
email: wiseman.69@osu.edu
Working Papers In Circulation
Legislative
Effectiveness in Congress (With Craig Volden)
We argue that congressional scholarship would benefit from an aggressive agenda to incorporate legislative effectiveness more fully into theoretical and empirical examinations of Congress. To facilitate this effort, we advance hypotheses from a foundational theory of lawmaking effectiveness that arises from members’ innate abilities, cultivated skills, and institutional positioning. We develop a method for cardinally ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives in terms of their effectiveness at moving bills through the legislative process, and we apply this method to generate a Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES) for each House member in each of the 97th-109th Congresses. We demonstrate that our measure is consistent with our theoretical hypotheses, and that it is relevant to the examination of numerous prior theories of legislative politics. We suggest a number of theoretical and empirical venues that could be enhanced by a greater focus on legislative effectiveness in Congress.
A
Theory of Government Regulation and Self-Regulation with the Specter
of Nonmarket Threats (With Craig Volden)
We develop a game-theoretic model wherein government establishes a mandate for product quality, without possessing effective enforcement abilities, and a firm chooses whether to comply with the government standard for quality. After bringing a product to market, the firm faces the possibility of nonmarket reactions by interests such as trial attorneys and consumer activists, who might sue in the case of product-induced damages, or reveal the firm’s quality choice to consumers through investigatory and publicity activities. Equilibrium results identify conditions under which firms will engage in meaningful self-regulation, by either voluntarily selecting a high quality standard for their product, independent of government mandate, or comply with a government mandate for high quality, even though government lacks enforcement power. Our results have direct implications for how political actors might choose to regulate certain industries based on the market value of different product qualities, the danger associated with various products, and the nature of the interest group environment.
