Government Corruption and Legislative Procedures: is one chamber better than two?

This paper studies the impact of the competition between lobbies and voters on policy outcomes under alternative legislative procedures. Lobbies and citi-zens have opposing interests on a public policy and offer respectively money and votes to legislators to obtain their preferred policy. Comparing a legislative pro-cedure with a single chamber (unicameralism) and a legislative procedure with two chambers (bicameralism) we show that, a bicameral system, where the same party controls the two chambers, may improve the accountability of the legisla-tors to the electorate. If the two chambers are controlled by opposite parties, this result needs not to be true. We also show that bicameralism with amend-ment right of the second chamber (open rule) is better than bicameralism with no amendment right of the second chamber (closed rule). Finally, the evidence from a cross-country analysis including 43 democracies with different legislative structures (unicameral and bicameral) is consistent with our theoretical findings. ∗I am indebted to Timothy Besley for his dedicated supervision. I also wish to thank Orian