The+Organization+of+Democratic+Legislatures

Summary by Annie Gillman, 10/21/10 In a legislative “state of nature” all bills are decided on the floor in plenary (everyone gets a vote) and everyone has veto power. Not surprisingly, nothing would get passed in this situation. As such, special offices are created with “agenda-setting power.” The main questions then become: who gets the offices? and how do difference structures of agenda-setting powers affect legislative processes and outcomes? ● In legislative state of nature, de facto rule is that bills only pass by unanimity as opposed to majority rule, b/c anyone can veto. People’s power to block exceeds people’s power to push laws forward. The primary problems that arise are coordination games (navigating the plenary bottleneck, aka bills getting stacked up b/c not enough time to consider them); trust games (arranging logrolls, aka I’ll vote for yours if you vote for mine); and common-pool games (stemming from equal access to plenary time, aka people draw too much from “common pool” of time in making long-winded speeches) ● The way you get around these problems is by creating power wielding offices, which is why legislatures are inherently not egalitarian. Some people get special agenda setting power--aka the “ability to determine which bills are considered on the floor and under which procedures.” In order to deal with the problems in the legislative state of nature you have to both create these special power offices and curb delay (by limiting debate). ● Parties (called “factions” in the literature) co-evolved with both intra-legislative and electoral rules, because joining together is the only way not only to win office, but to get special offices. ● There are different types of agenda setting power: ○ Positive power (also called proposal power) enables officers to ensure something gets to the floor to be considered; negative power (veto power) enables officers to prevent a bill from being considered ○ General power is not subject specific (e.g. power held by Speaker); jurisdiction specific power is (e.g. committee chair) ○ Early power is exercised early in the process (e.g. committees); later power is exerted late in the process (e.g. conference committees) ○ Decentralized power is in the hands of more individuals/groups; centralized...(you get the point) ● There are three main legislative outputs on which studies of combinations of veto and proposal powers address: ○ Volume of legislation produced ○ Reactions to legislative gridlock--in the face of majority parties being able to block all of their legislation, minority parties generally “go public,” spending time engaging directly with the public to appeal to them to advance their agenda ○ Roll rates--generally speaking, majority parties almost never get “rolled,” which means wanting preserve the status quo but being unable to do so   ● There are consequences of positive agenda-setting power: ○ In general, decentralized proposal power tends to lead to overspending ○ Legislators take steps to ameliorate this problem by stacking “priveleged” committees with excess majority members or to demand higher loyalty from members on privileged committees. ● There are also consequences of centralized agenda-setting power. The worse the default option in a legislative context (i.e. what happens if no legislation is passed), the greater the power of the agenda-setting agent. When default (called “reversion”) options are bad, agenda-setters get to resolve a coordination game (which of the better policy options will be chosen?) on their own terms. Two studies of this phenomenon are considered: ○ Policy directions--the further an agenda-setter is along a policy spectrum (left-to-right), the larger will be the proportion of bills they she will propose in the direction of their preference (this seems rather obvious to me, so perhaps I’m missing something here?) ○ When government has high agenda setting power, it will tend to pass relatively more complex and conflictual bills, since the relative “price” of passing such bills will be lower if you have agenda setting power. Since these bills take more time to process, however, they will tend to produce fewer bills overall. ● The theory offered by Cox, in which “endogenously created offices are key to securing control of the agenda,” is different from the “theory of responsible party government,” which emphasizes party discipline as the element that enables parties in power to control the agenda through “cohesive voting” (i.e. you better all vote Democrat if you’re in the party!). In fact, parties need the institutional mechanisms described in this paper, not just internal discipline, to control the legislative agenda.
 * The Organization of Democratic Legislatures by Gary Cox **