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Abstract
This dissertation consists of three essays that examine congressional politics. In the first essay, I explore the implications of using models of direct democracy to examine questions of political economy in countries with represenative democracy systems. I find that there are two main factors that cause the policy outcomes of a representative democracy system to deviate from direct democracy outcomes: the distribution of preferences across the general population of voters, and second is the degree to which legislative districts are ``gerrymandered". In the second essay, I examine the implications of the party cartel model of congressional policy making cite{Cox2005} on the level of redistributional social welfare spending in the United States. I find that for each $1,000 increase in median district income for the median member of the majority party, each redistributional Budget Authority sub-function decreases by an average of resultMean (for a total decrease of resultSum overall). In the third essay, I examine the implications of making existing single period game theoretic models of Congress dynamic. When the existing models are made dynamic and status quos are allowed to be inherited across time periods, different equilibrium predictions are made for each of the models, than those commonly attributed to them. The party cartel model begins to predict median outcomes and the pivotal politics model predicts outcomes that are significantly different from the location of the median member of the chamber. Overall, these three essays describe flaws in the current models of congressional policy-making and income redistribution and point toward possible solutions as well.