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 affiliation and 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.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.