This project investigates how legislatures determine outcomes - -the level of the budget or the toughness of an environmental law, for example. There are two basic views on this question. The first states that the majority rules: a coalition develops that can pass what it favors. The second view argues that legislators compromise among themselves to find a result that maximizes the net benefits to the legislators as a whole. The two perspectives have very different implications for American politics. Under the first, a small majority could take advantage of the minority by passing something that greatly harmed them - - or their constituents. Parties and coalitions should be extremely important, as they determine "who will win." Under the second view, compromise occurs based on each legislator's view of the relative importance of the issue, and ideology is not important. It is also possible that in reality both views have some validity. In this research investigation the first task is to describe the views precisely and formally, to be clear on just what each assumes and what each implies. This work leads to the second major task of the research: testing which of these views is more empirically accurate. For this purpose the investigator uses a "comparative statics" approach - - showing how some specific change in underlying conditions implies a change in outcomes. For example, a change in the number of Democratic Senators may have an effect on the defense budget, other things held constant. The size of these effects can then be tested empirically. But, most interesting, sometimes the two views have very different conclusions about what will happen. When the"status quo" changes, for instance, the majority rule view often predicts that a bill will replace the "status quo" with a different final outcome from the one originally preferred - - even though preferences have not changed. In contrast, the compromise view invariably predicts a change back to the originally preferred outcome. The different views can be most easily tested on experimental data collected previously to test other theories of how committees function. These data are a "gold-mine" of results where the preferences of the "legislators" are known, and the outcomes are known. Preliminary investigation has found several cases in which comparative statics results support the compromise view. There are also several cases in which the results contradict all current theories; this may lead to better theories in the future. Finally, the different views can be tested on Congressional roll-call data. The researcher has chosen to focus on one policy issue of the late 1970s, which provides a considerable number of roll call votes over several Congresses. The different theories predict that as members of Congress are replaced, the outcome will change - - in different ways. Therefore, this will permit a fairly direct test of the two views of legislatures. If no unexpected difficulties arise, this method would allow investigators to see how responsive the Congress is to changes in the views of the public - shown by changes in members of Congress at election time.
