Sour Notes on the Theory of Vote Trading

The recent literature on logrolling or vote trading has been quite long on intuitive argument and carefully constructed examples, and short on general theorems. This state of affairs is not too surprising since for all the scholarly attention the subject has recently enjoyed, there is remarkably little agreement on concepts or definitions. As a result most arguments are carried out in an ambiguous setting, and authors appear to arrive at quite different conclusions about the outcomes of vote trading in legislatures. Just to provide some orientation for those who have not plowed through the literature recently, I shall provide a brief review of the literature on the subject.