the incentive to do so. I encourage cross-national research into the conditions that
allow for legislatures to develop policy expertise, such as tenure and reelection
rates, committee resources, and reassignment rates. I also promote cross-national
analysis of roll call voting to map and model the legislative universe of party and
coalition unity, the essential components of decisiveness. Finally, I encourage
empirical studies of legislative–executive bargaining to determine with greater
precision the conditions under which one branch or the other is better able
to secure the policy outcomes it prefers. This is a large agenda, but the
immense progress in the Weld of comparative legislative studies achieved in
recent years—only a sample of which is reviewed in detail here—suggests it is
well within reach.
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