Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation

Thomas Choate, John Weymark and Alan E Wiseman
Additional contact information
Thomas Choate: Department of Political Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Alan E Wiseman: Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2020, vol. 32, issue 2, 289-311

Abstract: We use an extension of the Baron–Ferejohn model of legislative bargaining in which there are three legislators, two of whom have partisan ties, to analyze the division of a fixed political resource in a majoritarian legislature. A legislator’s preferences depend on the shares that he and any copartisan receive. We ask whether there are circumstances under which a partisan legislator is willing to delegate proposal-making authority to a party leader so as to take advantage of the special proposal rights accorded by the legislature to this office rather than retaining equal-recognition proposal rights for himself. We show that this is the case only if (i) the leader’s proposal recognition probability is larger than the probability that one of the partisans is recognized when the legislators act independently, (ii) the value of partisan affiliation is sufficiently high, and (iii) the legislators are sufficiently impatient. We explore the relevance of these results to ongoing debates regarding the role and effect of parties and party leaders in Congress.

Keywords: Baron–Ferejohn legislative bargaining; political partisanship; proposal delegation; strong political party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629819895594 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Legislative Bargaining and Partisan Delegation (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:32:y:2020:i:2:p:289-311

DOI: 10.1177/0951629819895594

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().