How An Agenda Setter Induces Legislators to Adopt Policies They Oppose

Matthias Dahm and Amihai Glazer

No 111211, Working Papers from University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper addresses the puzzle of why redistributive legislation, which benefits a small minority, may pass with overwhelming majorities. It models a legislature in which the same agenda setter serves for two periods, showing how he can exploit a legislature (completely) in the first period by promising future benefits to legislators who support him. In equilibrium, a large majority of legislators vote for the first-period proposal because they thereby maintain the chance of belonging to the minimum winning coalition in the future. Legislators may therefore approve policies by large majorities, or even unanimously, that benefit few, or even none, of them. The results are robust: some institutional arrangements, such as super-majority rules or sequential voting, limit but do not eliminate the agenda setter's power to exploit the legislature; other institutions such as secret voting do not limit his power.

Keywords: Agenda setting; Legislation; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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https://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/workingpapers/2011-2012/glazer-11.pdf (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: How An Agenda Setter Induces Legislators to Adopt Policies They Oppose (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:irv:wpaper:111211

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