IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jothpo/v20y2008i1p67-92.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effort, Intensity and Position Taking

Author

Listed:
  • Kathleen Bawn

    (Department of Political Science, UCLA, Box 951472, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472, kbawn@ polisci.ucla.edu)

  • Gregory Koger

    (Department of Political Science, University of Miami, Box 248047, Coral Gables, FL 33143-6534, gregory.koger@gmail.com)

Abstract

Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for effort, and opportunity costs, and the team that produces more effort wins. We apply this model to four cases of major legislation from the pre-cloture Senate: passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Ship Purchase Act of 1915, the Ship Arming bill of 1917, and the adoption of the Senate cloture rule in 1917. These cases demonstrate the value of looking beyond legislative voting and the rules that structure it, and of including effort as a key element of the legislative game.

Suggested Citation

  • Kathleen Bawn & Gregory Koger, 2008. "Effort, Intensity and Position Taking," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 20(1), pages 67-92, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:20:y:2008:i:1:p:67-92
    DOI: 10.1177/0951629807084040
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629807084040
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0951629807084040?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Denzau, Arthur & Riker, William & Shepsle, Kenneth, 1985. "Farquharson and Fenno: Sophisticated Voting and Home Style," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 79(4), pages 1117-1134, December.
    2. Baron, David P. & Ferejohn, John A., 1989. "Bargaining in Legislatures," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 83(4), pages 1181-1206, December.
    3. Gregory J. Wawro & Eric Schickler, 2004. "Where's the Pivot? Obstruction and Lawmaking in the Pre‐cloture Senate," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 48(4), pages 758-774, October.
    4. Krehbiel, Keith & Shepsle, Kenneth A. & Weingast, Barry R., 1987. "Why are Congressional Committees Powerful?," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(3), pages 929-945, September.
    5. Thomas Romer & Howard Rosenthal, 1978. "Political resource allocation, controlled agendas, and the status quo," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 33(4), pages 27-43, December.
    6. Matthews, Donald R., 1959. "The Folkways of the United States Senate: Conformity to Group Norms and Legislative Effectiveness," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 53(4), pages 1064-1089, December.
    7. Shepsle, Kenneth A. & Weingast, Barry R., 1987. "The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(1), pages 85-104, March.
    8. Ordeshook, Peter C. & Schwartz, Thomas, 1987. "Agendas and the Control of Political Outcomes," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(1), pages 179-199, March.
    9. Riker, William H., 1980. "Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 74(2), pages 432-446, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. de Groot Ruiz, Adrian & Ramer, Roald & Schram, Arthur, 2016. "Formal versus informal legislative bargaining," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 1-17.
    2. Bhaskar Dutta & Matthew O. Jackson & Michel Le Breton, 2004. "Equilibrium agenda formation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 23(1), pages 21-57, August.
    3. Dan Usher, 2012. "Bargaining and voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 151(3), pages 739-755, June.
    4. Nelson, Hal T. & Rose, Adam & Wei, Dan & Peterson, Thomas & Wennberg, Jeffrey, 2015. "Intergovernmental climate change mitigation policies: theory and outcomes," Journal of Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 35(1), pages 97-136, April.
    5. Ryan J. Vander Wielen, 2013. "Why conference committees? A theory of conference use in structuring bicameral agreement," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 25(1), pages 3-35, January.
    6. Keith Krehbiel, 2004. "Legislative Organization," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 18(1), pages 113-128, Winter.
    7. Kenneth Shepsle & Barry Weingast, 2012. "Why so much stability? Majority voting, legislative institutions, and Gordon Tullock," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 152(1), pages 83-95, July.
    8. Itai Sened, 1995. "Equilibria in Weighted Voting Games with Sidepayments," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 7(3), pages 283-300, July.
    9. Keith Krehbiel, 1996. "Institutional and Partisan Sources of Gridlock," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 8(1), pages 7-40, January.
    10. Paulo Pereira, 2000. "From Schumpeterian Democracy to Constitutional Democracy," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 69-86, March.
    11. Tasos Kalandrakis, 2006. "Proposal Rights and Political Power," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 50(2), pages 441-448, April.
    12. Alessandro Riboni, 2013. "Ideology and endogenous constitutions," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 52(3), pages 885-913, April.
    13. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. "Political economics and public finance," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 24, pages 1549-1659, Elsevier.
    14. Anesi, Vincent & Duggan, John, 2018. "Existence and indeterminacy of markovian equilibria in dynamic bargaining games," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(2), May.
    15. Deniz Aksoy, 2010. "Who gets what, when, and how revisited: Voting and proposal powers in the allocation of the EU budget," European Union Politics, , vol. 11(2), pages 171-194, June.
    16. Daniel Diermeier & Pohan Fong, 2011. "Bargaining over the budget," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 36(3), pages 565-589, April.
    17. Kenneth Shepsle & Barry Weingast, 1981. "Structure-induced equilibrium and legislative choice," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 37(3), pages 503-519, January.
    18. Kanu, Edmond Augustine & Henning, Christian H. C. A., 2019. "An assessment of land reform policy processes in Sierra Leone: A network based approach," Working Papers of Agricultural Policy WP2019-04, University of Kiel, Department of Agricultural Economics, Chair of Agricultural Policy.
    19. Diermeier, Daniel & Fong, Pohan, 2012. "Characterization of the von Neumann–Morgenstern stable set in a non-cooperative model of dynamic policy-making with a persistent agenda setter," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 349-353.
    20. Rosenthal, Howard & Zame, William R., 2022. "Sequential referenda with sophisticated voters," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 212(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:20:y:2008:i:1:p:67-92. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.