ECONOMY

arry r. weingast & donald a. wittman 11
reduces this uncertainty. In this world, committees are bodies of legislative experts in
the policies of their jurisdiction. Committee expertise allows committee members to
reduce the uncertainty between legislation and actual outcomes.
This perspective has significant implications for legislative organization, including
the choice of rules governing consideration of legislation on the floor. For example,
because expertise requires costly investment, legislators will undertake this costly
investment only if the system somehow compensates them for this. Krehbiel argues
that restrictive rules that bias legislative choice in favor of committees are the answer.
Although restrictive rules prevent legislators from choosing policy associated with
the median voter ex post,legislatorsarebetteroff ex ante because committee expertise
allows committees to reduce the uncertainty associated with the difference between
legislation and policy outcomes.
1.5 Concluding Thoughts
The debate about legislative institutions has been lively, and no consensus has yet
emerged on the determinants of legislative organization. We cannot yet say whether
one perspective will ultimately triumph (as Gilligan and Krehbiel 1995 suggest) or
whether a synthesis of perspectives is likely to emerge (as Shepsle and Weingast 1995
suggest).
From a broader perspective, the study of legislative institutions provides a template
for how research on institutions is likely to proceed in the future. The first stage
is to see how a particular institution affects behavior; next, similar but somewhat
different institutions are compared; then in the final stage, institutions are treated as
being endogenous. If the history of research on endogenous legislative institutions
is any guide, there will be disagreement on which institutions are endogenous to
other institutions. These controversies, in turn, help shape our understanding of
institutions and provide a deeper understanding of organizations.
2 Revelation and Aggregation of
Information:Voting
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In this section, we consider the revelation and aggregation of information. This is
a game-theoretic, as opposed to a decision-theoretic, approach to information. An
exciting aspect of this research is that it often turns the standard theoretic wisdom on
its head. We illustrate by looking at voting behavior. 9
Traditional democratic theory argues that, for democracy to work, voters should
inform themselves about the candidates and the issues. Moreover, voters should
be unbiased and rely on unbiased sources of information. Practice in all working
⁹ Ansolabehere (this volume) reviews the broad topic of voting behavior.