Parties, Coalitions, and the Internal Organization of Legislatures

Abstract

W e present a theory of parties-in-legislatures that can generate partisan policy outcomes despite the absence of any party-imposed voting discipline. Legislators choose all procedures and policies through majority-rule bargaining and cannot commit to vote against their preferences on either. Yet, off-median policy bias occurs in equilibrium because a majority of legislators with correlated preferences has policy-driven incentives to adopt partisan agenda-setting rules--as a consequence, bills reach the floor disproportionately from one side of the ideological spectrum. The model recovers, as special cases, the claims of both partisan and nonpartisan theories in the ongoing debate over the nature of party influence in the U.S. Congress. We show that (1) party influence increases in polarization, and (2) the legislative median controls policy making only when there are no bargaining frictions and no polarization. We discuss the implications of our findings for the theoretical and empirical study of legislatures.

Dáil reforms since 2011: Pathway to power for the ‘puny’ parliament?

“…Reform moved from being an academic discussion to an immediate necessity. This development accords with much research which shows that increasing fragmentation of politics and ideological polarisation are associated with more decentralised agenda control (Diermeier & Vlaicu, 2011;Diermeier et al, 2015). The thirty-second Dáil established a Sub-Committee on Dáil Reform, chaired by the Ceann Comhairle, which, on the basis of submissions received from all parties, groups and some individual TDs, discussed and agreed fundamental reforms to standing orders, which were subsequently approved by the Dáil.…”

Characterization of the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set in a non-cooperative model of dynamic policy-making with a persistent agenda setter

“…Note that the special cases of unanimity rule, simple majority rule and dictatorship correspond to q = n, n+1 2 and 1, respectively. 4 1 Such proposal rights may be endogenously allocated by a contest (Deng and Fong, 2012) or a procedural vote Feddersen, 1998 andVlaicu, 2011) or bargaining between multiple legislative chambers (Diermeier and Myerson, 1999). In each of these models the equilibrium allocation of proposal power is highly unequal, assigning a recognition probability of zero to some of the members.…”

A spatial theory of party formation

“…The literature on the endogenous formation of parties in a legislative assembly has noted that parties form to distribute pork (Baron 1989 andJackson andMoselle 2002), to control the agenda (Cox andMcCubbins 1993 and2007;Diermeier and Vlaicu 2008) or to eradicate cycles 4 and to solve the instability inherent to political competition in multiple dimensions (Aldrich 1995). I show that legislators have incentives to coordinate their votes, coalescing into a voting bloc purely for ideological gain, even if they have no control over the agenda, and even in the absence of majority cycles or instability.…”

“…Second, I endogenize the agenda, letting an agent choose the policy proposals strategically. Diermeier and Vlaicu (2008) show that a majority of legislators who ex ante share the same type form a party to gain control of the agenda. My theory is robust to the consideration of both an exogenous and an endogenous agenda, while allowing for agents who all have ex ante different preferences.…”