Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation

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.