Legislative Pivots, Presidential Powers, and Policy Stability

摘要

We offer a general model of policy making across presidential systems, exploring how checks and balances interact with legislative party systems to determine the responsiveness of political systems to electoral change. Using the two dominant theories of policy making in the United States as a starting point, we formally model the legislative process across presidential regimes characterized by a wide array of institutional designs, simulate expected policy behavior, and then test our models empirically with data capturing economic policy choices.