When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed or Fail? A Sweep Approach

• In Event: Understanding Legislative Negotiation

Abstract

Apart from a handful of studies of individual cases of legislative bargaining, legislative scholars have lacked significant empirical data about how particular features of the negotiation process may contribute to its ultimate outcome. This project addresses this absence of data by creating and analyzing a new dataset of individual cases of legislative negotiation in Congress between. 1980 and 2010. Using the “sweep” method pioneered by David Mayhew (1991, 2000), which requires reviewing prominent histories, secondary accounts, and/or press stories to identify references to historical political events (in this case, [a] published accounts of particular bills, [b] major Congress-oriented publications such as Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, and [c] memoirs/autobiographies of retired congressmembers in which instances of legislative negotiation are discussed), I test the following hypotheses: (1) as polarization increases, intraparty negotiations are more likely to be successful than interparty negotiations, (2) negotiations are more likely to be successful on issues that are less polarizing and salient to the public, and (3) negotiations are more likely to be successful when the participants have served longer in Congress, are more electorally secure, or have demonstrated greater legislative effectiveness

Author

• Matthew N. Green, Catholic University of America