Research
If you have any trouble downloading any of the manuscripts, please let me know and I will be happy to send you a copy by mail or e-mail.
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file updated May 5, 2008
Abstracts
The Robust Federation offers a comprehensive approach to the study of federalism. It demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. These authority boundaries matter – for defense, economic growth, and adequate political representation – and must be defended from opportunistic transgression. From Montesquieu to Madison, the legacy of early institutional analysis focuses attention on the value of competition between institutions, such as the policy moderation produced through separated powers. Bednar offers a reciprocal theory: in an effective constitutional system, institutions complement one another; each makes the others more powerful. Diverse but complementary safeguards – including the courts, political parties, and the people – cover different transgressions, punish to different extents, and fail under different circumstances. The analysis moves beyond equilibrium conceptions and explains how the rules that allocate authority are not fixed but shift gradually. Bednar’s rich theoretical characterization of complementary institutions provides the first holistic account of federal robustness.
"Is Full Compliance Possible?"
Games of public good provision, collective action, and collusion share concern for the free rider that shirks on its obligations. According to the Folk Theorem, the free rider problem can be resolved through punishment mechanisms. Versions of the Folk Theorem even apply when monitoring is imperfect. Empirical evidence from E. Ostrom and others contradicts this theory: while often subjects cooperate significantly, rarely is all shirking eliminated. To reconcile theory with empirical evidence, I construct a general class of compliance models with imperfect monitoring through a common signal. I derive sufficient conditions---on both the utility of agents and the monitoring capabilities---under which slippage from full compliance is unavoidable, showing the limits of the Folk Theorem logic. The results cover most cases of concern to political scientists and political economists including public goods provision, contract and treaty compliance, collective action, and even Cournot competition. The paper concludes with a discussion about institutional design. (return to list)
"Can Game(s) Theory Explain Culture?" (with S. Page).
The hallmarks of “cultural behavior” are consistency within and across individuals, variance between populations, and often suboptimal performance. In this paper, we build a formal model that derives each of these four behavioral attributes. Our model rests on two simple assumptions: (i) agents play ensembles of games, not just single games as is traditionally the case in evolutionary game theory models and (ii) agents have limited cognitive abilities. We analyze our model using both agent-based techniques and mathematics. The former enable us to explore dynamics of the model and the latter allow us to prove when the behaviors produced by the agents are equilibria. Our results provide game theoretic foundations for cultural diversity and agent-based support for how cultural behavior might emerge. (return to list)
"Credit Assignment and Federal Encroachment."
Opportunistic encroachment by the national government on state policy domains erodes the robustness of federal unions. Theories of electoral and political safeguards of federalism suggest that the political process protects federalism's boundaries. This article develops a theory distinguishing risk-seeking and risk-avoiding political behavior and applies its insights to the debate about the sufficiency of the political process to police federalism. Under average conditions, the political process deters encroachment, but under more extreme conditions it fails: elected officials set policy according to the risk associated with their electoral retention rather than the policy's expected return to the voters or the health of the federation; this manipulation of the risk environment may lead a central government to encroach upon a state's domain opportunistically. The federal problem of credit assignment exposes a weakness in the political safeguards theory to protect federalism's boundaries: electoral mechanisms both encourage and discourage encroachment. Due to this fallibility in the political process, judicial intervention in federalism disputes may be justified.
"Shirking and Stability in Federal Systems" April 2001.
Intergovernmental regimes, from treaty organizations to federations, never operate in perfect harmony. Our instinct is to fine-tune the institutions that regulate relations between the governments until we eliminate all tension. With a model of incomplete information, this paper explains the persistence of shirking in intergovernmental organizations by showing that except under special circumstances, no full contribution equilibrium exists. Instead, the optimal possible equilibrium includes a suboptimal productive level from the union with occasional serious disputes. The institutionalized shirking and periodic disputes can be reinterpreted as evidence of an institutional structure that works well, rather than needing repair.
The results are extended in two ways. First, the players can opt out of the union. In the symmetric example, exit options only increase benefits if they are superior to the union's offerings: moderate to mediocre exit options {\it reduce} utility. In a second extension, the paper considers the effect of various forms of asymmetry on the equilibrium contributions by members. Here, we see that exit options may be of benefit to certain players, but not all.
The paper concludes with the suggestion that we design institutions that accommodate the natural tendency to shirk and efficiently manage any resulting tension. Although the model is motivated by federalism, the results may be interpreted generally for all repeated public good provision problems with a continuous action space and imperfect monitoring.
"Judicial Predictability and Federal Stability"
Institutions structure incentive environments for strategic actors. What is
the effect of a flawed institution---one that is not perfectly predictable---on
strategic behavior? This paper focuses on the influence of the judiciary on
intergovernmental rivalry in a federation, in particular considering how shifts
in judicial predictability affect federal opportunism. Results of the model
indicate that governments in a federation challenge one another’s behavior
in court less frequently as the judiciary grows more predictable, but the effect
of predictability on opportunism depends upon the cost of challenging an agent.
When costs are low, increasing the predictability of the court increases opportunism,
contrary to intuition. The model is extended to consider the effect of a biased
court. (return
to list)
"Federalism, Judicial Independence,
and the Power of Precedent." February 2001.
In this essay I discuss the importance of judicial independence to federalism. After setting the stage with a brief argument on the inadequacy of political safeguards to protect federalism and the usefulness of judicial safeguards, I turn to a discussion of judicial independence and two necessary conditions for judicial safeguards. In the final section I propose an argument about the power-creating force of precedent.