L egislatures in the United States and around the world are becoming increasingly diverse yet remain unrepresentative. From 1945 to 2012, the number of minority members of Congress rose from 3 to 90, and the number of women rose from 11 to 102. Nevertheless, Congress remains 83% white and 83% male. In the states, 89% of legislators are white and 86% are male. Similarly, the number of women in legislatures around the globe has increased fourfold since 1945, but men still hold 88% of worldwide legislative seats.The lack of diversity in contemporary legislatures is a significant problem not only from the perspective of descriptive representation and identity politics, but also for democratic decision making in general. Diverse groups can make better decisions than homogeneous ones because diverse perspectives offer the potential for creative decisions (Page 2007). For example, groups with more women tend to work together more effectively Kristin Kanthak is Associate Professor,

How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. However, we also observe outcomes in which a minimum winning coalition exploits the contributions of the remaining players. A second experiment demonstrates that when electoral delegation must be endogenously implemented, individuals voluntarily cede authority to an elected agent only when preplay communication is permitted. Our combined results demonstrate that democratic delegation helps groups overcome the free-rider problem and generally leads to outcomes that are often both efficient and equitable.

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Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators' goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis of a formal game theoretic model provides rigorous justification for the proposition, and empirical analysis of House and Senate bills from the 101st to 108th Congresses using cosponsorship data to measure the ideological locations of bills largely supports it. Committee leadership and majority party status have moderating effects while the effect of committee membership is slight. The analysis also tentatively supports the pivotalness of the median over other alternatives. Contrary to the view that bill sponsorship is mere position taking, legislative organization significantly shapes early-stage legislative behavior. Specifically, greater legislative influence implies greater responsiveness to the median legislator.

Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties' relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and "law and order" have been weaker. The authors also find that party competition has strengthened impressions of the parties. Results support the notion that parties carry a collective-if occasionally transitory-reputation on a host of issues.