Can the President or the Senate affect the balance of power in the House? We find that they can. Our answer comes from a model that links House leadership decisions to the constitutional requirement to build lawmaking coalitions with the Senate and President. Changing the ideal point of a non-House actor, while holding constant the ideal point of all House members, can alter the House’s balance of power. Power shifts because changes in the Senate or President can reshape the set of achievable legislative outcomes, which, in turn, alters the bargaining power of key House members. A corollary clarifies when empowering preference outliers (policy extremists) in the House leads to legislative outcomes that moderates prefer. Overall, our theory clarifies how constitutional requirements induce House members to make different leadership decisions than they would if they were, as commonly represented, unaware of other chambers or branches of government.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Public Economics with number
0510007.