Partisan strength and legislative bargaining

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 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.

Majoritarian Bargaining over Budgetary Divisions and Policy

“…Figure 3 takes as its outcome allocation amounts as opposed to policy choice. 11 We do not …nd consistent evidence that subjects in the majority allocate to themselves a greater share, and their partners a lesser share, of the budget as compared with subjects holding the committee's minority peak preference. 12 Majority players transfer a greater portion of the budget to their partners than anticipated.…”

Legislative bargaining and partisan delegation

“…For the special case when legislators are infinitely patient (i.e., they all have a common discount factor δ equal to 1), Calvert and Dietz (2005) developed a three-legislator model of majoritarian bargaining over a dollar in which two of the legislators are partisans, each of whom has preferences defined over his own share and the share of his copartisan. In Choate et al (2019), we characterized the bargaining equilibrium in this model for the more general case in which δ ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] , and we determined the extent to which bipartisan coalitions may, or may not, obtain in these environments. Montero (2007, 2008) analyzed a different bargaining environment, wherein legislators have preferences that exhibit inequity aversion.…”

“…Our model of legislative bargaining with partisanship builds on those of Calvert and Dietz (2005) and Choate et al (2019). There are three legislators who must decide on a distribution x = ( x 1 , x 2 , x 3 ) of a dollar among themselves, where x i ⩾ 0 for i = 1 , 2 , 3 and ∑ i = 1 3 x i = 1 .…”

“…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 (2005) and Choate et al (2019), we model partisanship by assuming that a legislator values a distribution of shares by adding a fixed fraction of his copartisan’s share of the dollar (if he has a copartisan) to his own share. These other-regarding preferences provide a parsimonious way of modeling partisan affinity when there are no ideological differences between legislators, as is the case when the issue being considered is purely distributive.…”

“…We have characterized the equilibrium in the partisan legislative bargaining game with equal recognition probabilities in Choate et al (2019). Here, we characterize the bargaining equilibrium that ensues when the two partisans form a party with one of them delegating his proposal rights to his party leader.…”