Papers

Working Paper
Gruenbaum, Ben. “Bargaining Over a Burden: How Legislatures Distribute Costs when Benefits are Fixed,” Working Paper.Abstract

Legislative bargaining is typically modeled as a
``Divide-the-Dollar'' game, with a divisible benefit and a fixed
cost. This framework is a reasonable simplification in many
contexts, but it fails to capture the incentives that prevail when a
legislature distributes the cost of providing a good with a fixed
benefit (i.e. a public good). In this paper, I propose and analyze a
model that corresponds to this scenario, and in turn, highlights how
bargains over burdens and bargains over benefits differ with respect
to the exercise of power, the construction of strategies, and the
features of equilibrium distributions. For example, if legislation
is considered in multiple stages (e.g. in the House Rule's committee
and then on the House floor), supermajority requirements will
actually reduce legislative gridlock with respect to the provision
of public goods. Also, allowing amendments, under certain
circumstances, makes all legislators worse off, and is especially
bad for those opposed to the proposal which passes. Uncovering
these and other results raise several possible empirical
applications, and suggests a new perspective on recent, high-profile
Congressional debates. Finally, the results also suggest new reasons
to expect that legislators would act quickly to establish durable
restrictions on majoritarian impulses: In their absence, bargaining over
burdens is likely to lead to outcomes that are extremely unequal,
inefficient, and often worse than the legislative status quo for all
legislators except those in control of the agenda.

Burden Bargaining
Gruenbaum, Ben. “How Elections and Parties Influence Legislative Effectiveness,” Working Paper.Abstract

This paper considers why some legislators are more effective
than others at advancing their preferred policies. Existing
studies on this subject, since they do not control for
underlying proposal content, fail to distinguish between
effective and accommodative legislating, and are unable to
identify causal influences on individual effectiveness. In this
paper, I use new data on U.S. Senate Amendments to address these
shortcomings. Specifically, I apply a novel text-processing
algorithm to identify a series of ``natural experiments'', where
one Senator introduces identical amendments under different
institutional settings. My results, unlike all previous studies,
suggest that majority-party membership does \emph{not} increase
effectiveness, but running for reelection does, at least for
minority-party Senators and especially for the most electorally
vulnerable of them. Overall, these findings suggest that Senate
policy-making institutions may be oriented more towards
incumbents' electoral incentives, regardless of party, and less
towards partisan competition than some recent scholarship
suggests.

Effectiveness Paper
Gruenbaum, Ben, and Chris Celaya. “Can Close Elections Ever Be "As-Good-As-Random"? A Matching Technique For Imbalanced Regression Discontinuity Designs,” Working Paper.Abstract

We adapt and apply recently developed matching methodologies to improve covariate balance across treatment groups for the purpose of estimating the causal effect of incumbency in the
US House of Representatives. In doing so we assess a recent finding by Caughey and Sekhon (2011)
that Regression Discontinuity (RD) design is invalid for estimating this quantity
because of unobserved differences in the ability of parties or candidates to affect the
outcome of extremely close elections. We also discuss more generally how covariate matching and
RD designs can be combined in future applied research. 

Paper Poster