The Congressional Leadership Dilemma
研究国会政党领导中的委托代理问题，提出领导质量差异和资源增加会降低撤换难度，导致政党在提升领导能力和保留撤换权之间权衡。
Abstract Previous theories assume that congressional party leaders internalize the welfare of the parties they lead. Accordingly, existing work deemphasizes the role of agency problems in explaining the conditions under which parties grant more political resources to their leaders. To show how agency problems can still arise even when the party leader wants only to maximize collective goods and stay in office, I offer a model that borrows two ideas from models of political accountability: leaders vary in quality and giving the leader more resources makes it more difficult to remove her. The model implies that the party faces a tradeoff between maximizing the leader’s capacity to produce collective goods and preserving its ability to remove low-quality leaders from office. This theory offers novel predictions, integrates existing results as implications of a single theory, and explains why the leader’s resources sometimes change even as the political context remains the same.