Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can be difficult to assess even with relatively simple bargaining protocols. We evaluate...

The higher legislative success of parliamentary governments relative to presidential governments has been used to argue that legislative success is driven by parliamentary governments' superior agenda power or their control of legislative majorities. We show that this approach is at odds with...

The goal of this paper is to develop an estimable model of President-Congress bargaining in the US, and to use this model to provide a better understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the outcome of a...

Outcomes under the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model are investigated when proposers distribute benefits versus imposing costs under an experimental design where predicted outcomes are theoretically isomorphic, absent reference dependent preferences. Initial experimental sessions showed greater...

We study a legislative bargaining game in which failure to agree in a given round may result in a breakdown of negotiations. In that case, each player receives an exogenous ‘disagreement value'. We characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibria under all q-majority rules. Under...

This paper examines the relationship between voting weights and expected equilibrium payoffs in legislative bargaining and provides a necessary and sufficient condition for payoffs to be proportional to weights. This condition has a natural interpretation in terms of the supply and demand for...

During the last decade unicameral proposals have been put forward in fourteen US states. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework casting some lights on the drawbacks of bicameral state legislatures and on the effects of the proposed constitutional reforms. In a setting where lawmakers...

Models of repeated legislative bargaining typically assume that an agenda setter is randomly selected each period, even if the agenda setter in the previous period successfully passed a proposal. In reality, successful legislative agenda setters (e.g., speakers, committee chairs) tend to hold...

We report the results of an experimental investigation of the Baron and Ferejohn (1989) model of legislative bargaining with cheap talk. Communication results in substantially increased proposer power, close to the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium prediction. This is achieved primarily...

We consider a model of decentralized bargaining among three parties. Parties meet one-on-one after being randomly matched, and can sell or buy votes to one another. The party with a majority of the votes can decide to implement its preferred policy or extend negotiations to capture additional...