Partisan strength and legislative bargaining
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Author | John A Weymark,Alan E Wiseman,Thomas Choate |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629818809416 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2019, Vol.31(1) 6–45
ÓThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629818809416
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Partisan strength and
legislative bargaining
Thomas Choate
Graduate School of Business,Stanford University, USA
John A Weymark
Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University,USA
Alan E Wiseman
Department of PoliticalScience, Vanderbilt University,USA
Abstract
We extend the canonical Baron–Ferejohn model of majoritarian legislative bargaining in order to
analyze the effects of partisanship on bargaining outcomes. We consider three legislators, two of
whom are party affiliated, with each partisan placing some value on the share of the dollar
obtained by his copartisan in addition to his own share. We characterize the equilibrium of our
model as a function of the strength of party affiliationand the degree to which the legislators have
concern for the future; and we determine how the equilibrium varies in response to changes in
these two parameters. We show how partisanship advantages the affiliated legislators relative to
the nonpartisan and identify the circumstances in which a majority party legislator proposes a
bipartisan outcome.
Keywords
Baron–Ferejohn; distributive politics; legislative bargaining; partisanship
1. Introduction
Casual observers of American politics are constantly bombarded with headlines
about how contemporary legislative politics have become increasingly partisan.
Corresponding author:
Alan E Wiseman, Department of PoliticalScience, Vanderbilt University, PMB #505, 230 Appleton Place,
Nashville, TN 37203-5721, United States.
Email: alan.wiseman@vanderbilt.edu
Whether due to the natural geographic sorting of voters into more ideologically
homogeneous constituencies (e.g., Chen and Rodden, 2013; Dodd and
Oppenheimer, 2017), gerrymandering (e.g., La Raja, 2009), or the general empow-
erment of party leaders (e.g., Aldrich and Rohde, 2017), many congressional scho-
lars have suggested that parties in the United States Congress are more
ideologically divergent than they have been for over a century (e.g., Hare and
Poole, 2014). Likewise, scholars of political psychology (e.g., Hetherington and
Rudolph, 2015) have argued that this increase in partisanship has corresponded to
a decrease in trust across the parties, which makes the policymaking process
increasingly contentious in Washington.
These scholarly and journalistic accounts suggest that the rise of partisan con-
flicts in Congress has led to a rise in legislative gridlock or, at least, an increase in
the incidence of one-sided policy outcomes being obtained, with the minority party
being effectively shut out of the policymaking process. As legislators have come to
place greater value on partisanship, majority party members have had less of an
incentive to reach out to members of the minority party for their support even on
relatively minor legislative issues (Lee, 2016); and the majority party leadership
have had more of an incentive to make concessions to dissonant voices in their
own party. In addition, members of the minority party are increasingly expected to
do whatever they can to prevent a policy victory for the majority party, even if that
victory might benefit the minority party’s interests as well.
While such arguments seem sensible at face value, and comport nicely with
recent journalistic accounts of contemporary legislative politics, other factors may
limit their applicability. Of particular importance is the way that partisanship inter-
acts with the value that legislators place on future outcomes, such as a party obtain-
ing (or retaining) majority party status or successfully implementing its agenda in
later sessions of the legislature. It is plausible to conjecture that in order to secure
policy agreements, in some circumstances the leadership of a majority party would
be either willing to reach out to members of the minority party or willing not to
cater to extreme interests in its own party. It is also plausible to believe that there
are circumstances in which members of a minority party are able to offer some
members of the majority party something so as to secure policy outcomes that they
find mutually advantageous.
To engage with these issues, we develop a model of legislative bargaining over a
fixed divisible resource—a dollar—that builds on the distributive politics models of
Baron and Ferejohn (1989) and Calvert and Dietz (2005). Our model accounts for
both the strength of a legislator’s party affiliation and the extent to which future
outcomes matter for current negotiations. Specifically, we consider three legislators,
two of whom (the partisans) belong to the same political party, who bargain over
how to divide a dollar. In each period until majority agreement is reached, a legisla-
tor is recognized with equal probability to make a proposal. Future shares are dis-
counted by a common discount factor. The nonpartisan’s payoff is simply the
present value of his share of the dollar. A partisan’s payoff, however, consists of a
fraction of what his copartisan obtains added to the amount that he receives
Choate et al. 7
(discounted to the present). The weight that a partisan places on his copartisan’s
share of the dollar is our measure of the strength of partisanship (i.e., of party
affiliation).
We allow both the party affiliation parameter and the discount factor to vary.
Hence, our model allows us to assess how the outcome of legislative bargaining
depends on both the strength of party affiliation and on the value that legislators
place on future payoffs. The model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989) for the case when
there are three legislators and the partisan symmetric baseline model of Calvert
and Dietz (2005) are special cases of our own. Baron and Ferejohn permit the dis-
count factor to vary, but assume that legislators only care about their own shares.
Calvert and Dietz allow for any degree of partisan affiliation, but only consider the
case in which the legislators are infinitely patient (i.e., the discount factor is 1).
The Baron–Ferejohn model is concerned with determining how particularistic
goods—the shares of a fixed resource—are distributed when the interests of the
legislators exhibit an extreme form of conflict: each legislator seeks to maximize his
own share at the expense of the other legislators. By having a partisan care about
what his copartisan receives, not just about his own share, as in Calvert and Dietz
(2005), we are regarding partisanship as a form of preference similarity. This is a
natural way to introduce preference similarity when there is no ideological compo-
nent to a legislator’s preferences, as is the case here when bargaining only concerns
the distribution of a benefit. The concern for a copartisan’s share could arise
because legislators might have electoral (or within party) benefits from providing
goods to a copartisan’s district. For example, when a majority party’s members
have similar interests, the party is better able to deliver on the policies it has pro-
posed, which enhances its members’ chances of being re-elected.
As in Calvert and Dietz (2005), a partisan trades off his share with that of his
copartisan at a fixed rate. In other words, the partisans do not exhibit any inequal-
ity aversion about how the resource is shared among themselves. Furthermore, the
payoff externality appears symmetrically in the two partisans’ utility functions.
Both of these assumptions could be relaxed. Montero (2007) extends the n-person
Baron–Ferejohn legislative bargaining model by having each legislator care about
the equitableness of the division of the dollar, not just his own share. Montero
(2008) relaxes the symmetry assumption in a three-legislator model by allowing the
rate at which a legislator trades off shares to be legislator specific. However, she
assumes that each legislator weights the shares received by each of the other legisla-
tors by a common factor, and so does not allow for partisanship.
1
Allowing for
either inequality aversion or differential share weights when there is partisanship
would significantly complicate the analysis, so we do not consider these possibili-
ties here. Our results can be viewed as providing a benchmark for assessing the
extent to which these factors play a role in determining the equilibrium shares.
The assumption that members of the same political party experience positive
utility from shares of the dollar being allocated to their copartisans is consistent
with recent scholarship on the ‘particularistic president’ (e.g., Kriner and Reeves,
2015; Rogowski, 2016), which has demonstrated how presidents have historically
distributed federal dollars disproportionately to areas represented by their
8Journal of Theoretical Politics 31(1)
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