Party in Government: Structure-Induced Equilibrium

1
Party in Government Structure-Induced Equilibrium

• Last time stabilizing collective choice
• Today more of the same

2
Party in Government

• Long coalitions of elected officials
• How to stabilize cooperation within the
  legislature when members want different things?
• Divide the dollar game N players bargain over
  how to split up a pie, using majority rule on
  binary agendas to decide
• any proposed division that rewards a majority of
  members can be trumped by a different division
  rewarding a different majority

3
Gains from Trade

• How can the divide-the-dollar game be solved?
• recognition rules and first-mover advantage
• If different legislators want different things
  from government, maybe there are opportunities
  for institutionalizing trading relationships
• divide up the pie into different substantive
  policy arenas assign special agenda powers to
  subgroups responsible for each of the arenas

4
Median voter theorem

• Open-rule amendment agendas with a simple
  policy space expected outcome is the median
  voters favorite policy

Range of stuff v2 likes better than q
v1
v2
v3
q
v2 is the median voter here. The closest thing to
his ideal point that gets voted on should win
against any other alternative on the agenda. q
is the status quo or reversionary policy
5
Proposal power

• If someone other than the median voter has
  control over what alternatives can be voted on,
  that person can pull outcomes away from the
  median voters ideal outcome

Range v1 likes better than q
v1
v2
v3
q
If v1 has proposal power, she would restrict the
agenda to alternatives close to v1.. Similarly,
v3 would restrict the agenda to alternatives
close to v3.
6
Gatekeeping power

• If someone other than the median member can
  unilaterally prevent changes to the reversionary
  policy, that person can stop policy changes that
  would be acceptable to a majority

7
Structure-induced equilibrium

• An SIE is a stable group-choice outcome (one that
  wont be overturned by the current members) that
  is stable due to both the distribution of
  preferences among members and the distribution of
  special privileges to members (e.g., proposal
  power or gate-keeping power).

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SIE and party-in-government

• legislative parties are long coalitions
  members agree to cooperate repeatedly over some
  set of issues
• one way to institutionalize such bargains is to
  invest gatekeeping or proposal powers in the
  hands of specific members
• these powers are invested by the whole
  legislature (or a winning coalition therein)