AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF POLICY PRODUCTION

This section presents a variant of the labor-leisure model presented in the chapter text. Instead of trading off time spent during a session between policy and political work, legislators divide all of their time between “public service” (the combination of policy and political efforts) and their private lives. Like the hours spent politicking in the original model, time devoted to private life translates directly into utility and is graphed on the horizontal axis of Figure A7.1 The fruits of public service efforts are determined by the sum of hours spent on politics and the product of policy work times a wage. The basic equilibrium here looks much like the model contained in the text. The number of hours in a year, rather than in a session, forms the legislator's time constraint. Because I assume that members must spend at least some time participating in the legislative session, the time constraint does not allow the legislator to spend so many hours in private life that he or she devotes no time at all to public service. The line representing the time constraint, as a consequence, stops at the point marking the total number of hours in a year minus the mandatory time devoted to public service.

The legislator's optimal allocation between consumption of utility from public service and time spent in private life (P*, C*) is not changed when term limits cut his or her time horizons short.