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.
Breaking
Gridlock: The Determinants of Health Policy Change in Congress
(With Craig Volden)
Scholars have often commented that health policymaking in Congress is mired in political gridlock, that reforms are far more likely to fail than to succeed, and the path forward is unclear. To reach such conclusions, scholars of health politics have tended to analyze individual major reform proposals to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future. Taking a different approach, we examine all health policies proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1973 and 2002. We analyze these bills’ fates and the effectiveness of their sponsors in guiding their proposals through Congress. Set against a baseline of policy advancements in other policy areas, we demonstrate that health policymaking is indeed far more gridlocked than policymaking in most other areas. We then isolate some of the causes of this gridlock, as well as the some of the conditions that can help to bring about health policy change.
A
Theory of Government Regulation and Self-Regulation with the Specter
of Nonmarket Threats (With Craig Volden)
We develop a game-theoretic model wherein a government establishes a mandate for product quality without possessing effective enforcement abilities, and a firm chooses whether to ignore, comply with, or exceed the government quality standard. 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 selfregulation, either by voluntarily selecting a high-quality standard for their product absent a government mandate, or by complying with a government mandate for high quality even though government lacks enforcement power. Our results have direct implications for how political actors choose to regulate certain industries based on the market value of different products, on the danger associated with various products, and on the nature of the nonmarket environment.
Formal
Approaches to the Study of Congress (With Craig Volden)
Written for inclusion in the Oxford Handbook of the American Congress
