Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629819895594 |
| Published date | 01 April 2020 |
| Date | 01 April 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2020, Vol.32(2) 289–311
ÓThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629819895594
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Legislative bargaining and
partisan delegation
Thomas Choate
Department of PoliticalScience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
John A Weymark
Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University,Nashville, TN, USA
Alan E Wiseman
Department of PoliticalScience, Vanderbilt University,Nashville, TN, USA
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 pro-
posal 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 relevanceof these results to ongoing
debates regarding the role and effectof parties and party leaders in Congress.
Keywords
Baron–Ferejohn legislative bargaining; political partisanship; proposal delegation; strong political
party.
Corresponding author:
Alan E Wiseman, Department of PoliticalScience, Vanderbilt University, PMB #505, 230 Appleton Place,
Nashville, TN 37203-5721, USA.
Email: alan.wiseman@vanderbilt.edu
1. Introduction
Legislatures differ widely in their organization and procedures, yet they exhibit cer-
tain common features, such as institutional positions that exercise agenda-setting
powers (Cox, 2006). As a general rule, legislators with agenda-setting authority can
ostensibly use this power to facilitate the adoption of policies that favor them at
the expense of a legislative majority. This raises the question posed by Gilligan and
Krehbiel (1987: 288): ‘‘Why and under what conditions would a majority commit
to a process that appears to limit its influence on legislative policy?’’ In the case that
they consider, Gilligan and Krehbiel argue that endowing committees with the abil-
ity to make proposals that cannot be amended when they are considered by the full
chamber can be in the interest of the legislative majority if this procedure results in
more informed decision-making.
Informational considerations also play a prominent role in other situations in
which legislators delegate some of their decision-making authority. For example, in
the literature on formal models of bureaucracy surveyed by Gaillmard and Patty
(2012), a central concern has been whether it is in the interest of legislators to dele-
gate some discretionary policy-making authority to a bureaucracy because of its
specialized expertise. A further example is provided by the model of party factions
developed by Dewan and Squintani (2015), in which a legislator relinquishes some
of his independence to a faction leader to whom other legislators are willing to
share information that results in a more-informed party platform.
In contrast to analyses of legislative delegation based on informational consid-
erations, we investigate the role of legislative rules in facilitating delegation to a
party leader in a distributive politics setting. More precisely, we consider a majority
group of legislators who are not organized as a formal party, but exhibit some par-
tisan affinities, and we examine a related question to the one posed by Gilligan and
Krehbiel: are there circumstances under which a group of similarly minded inde-
pendent legislators who have equal proposal rights would willingly have themselves
recognized as a party, giving up their agenda-setting rights to a party leader who is
accorded special proposal rights, who then employs that authority to pursue his
policy interests, possibly at the expense of some of his copartisans’ interests? We
consider delegation only with respect to proposal rights; a legislator in our model
retains his voting rights over policy proposals even if he delegates his agenda-setting
rights. In particular, the party leader has no mechanisms at his disposal to enforce
party discipline at the voting stage. We assume that a party leader’s proposal rights
are fixed by a constitution or by convention and cannot be modified (at least not
during the current legislative session). The benchmark from which the benefits of
partisan delegation are assessed corresponds to what Cox (2006) calls a ‘‘legislative
state of nature.’’
We address our question using a simple model in which three legislators, two of
whom are copartisans, engage in bargaining over particularistic goods, which we
formalize as bargaining over the division of a dollar, as in Baron and Ferejohn
(1989).
1
In the Baron–Ferejohn model, legislators only care about their own shares
and, hence, there is no formal role for partisanship. Following Calvert and Dietz
290 Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(2)
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