Understanding Legislative Negotiation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Negotiation is central to legislative policymaking, which makes it critical to democratic efficacy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US, where institutional structures and partisan polarization combine to uniquely burden the legislative process. Despite such clear political salience, however, empirically-minded students of American politics have devoted very little energy to studying legislative negotiation dynamics over the past fifty years. Recognizing this scholarly gap, momentum is now building behind efforts to construct a new edifice of knowledge. This proposed panel highlights four of the most promising new lines of inquiry. Using creative research designs and painstakingly collected original data, each project contributes novel insights into American legislative negotiation—the institutional factors, strategic considerations, issue contexts, behavioral techniques, and personal characteristics that determine success or failure.

Papers

“High Stakes Negotiation: Reaching Agreement on Pandemic Aid in 2020”

In this paper, we apply concepts from the literature on negotiation to better understand how policymakers “got to yes” on 2020’s two largest COVID aid packages. The concept of the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) affords a systematic way to think through the fundamental choice each side weighs in negotiations. “All party mapping” is a critical skill for coalition leaders, as they anticipate the players who need to be included. We also show that the Covid-aid negotiations were shaped by anchoring, sequencing, and repeated interaction. We discuss how these concepts help advance congressional studies beyond simple theoretical models that assume a fixed bargaining space and a single dimension.

“Party Dynamics in Congressional Negotiations”

Under what circumstances do majority and minority parties in Congress achieve greater or fewer of their objectives within policy negotiations? In prior work, we (Ballard and Curry 2021) advance a theory of minority party capacity, arguing that congressional minority parties have greater capacity to influence policymaking outcomes when (1) the majority party is constrained in its ability to take action, (2) the minority party is unified around what it wants to accomplish, and (3) the minority party prefers to legislate, rather than electioneer. In this paper, we test our theory on an original dataset of majority policymaking efforts since the 1980s that featured significant two-party negotiations. These data help us understand when and why the minority party sometimes gets more of it what it wants in negotiations, the majority party sometimes gets more of what it wants, and sometimes negotiations end in a draw.

“Collective Representation Negotiated by Black Women Legislators”

Legislative caucuses matter for understanding vote cohesion, solidarity, and symbolic representation; however, what remains less clear is the role that identity-based caucuses play in negotiation. In this paper, we center Black women legislators in Maryland to illustrate the complexity of representation as a Black woman within raced and gendered institutions which only offer collective representation within single-axis caucuses. We use interview data collected in the spring of 2022 to assess how caucus membership and maintenance do not adequately take into account how identity shapes the motivations, experiences, and behavior of intersectionally marginalized legislators. We find that while caucuses are useful in advancing the policy priorities of Black women lawmakers, the politics and strategies they use to advance their policies differ. Thus, we observe varied ways that this population draws on their identities to negotiate within single-axis identity caucuses.

“When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed or Fail? A Sweep Approach”

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 creates and analyzes a new dataset of individual cases of legislative negotiation in Congress between 1980 and 2010 to 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

Sub Unit

• Division 22: Legislative Studies

Individual Presentations

• High Stakes Negotiation: Reaching Agreement on Pandemic Aid in 2020 - Frances E. Lee, Princeton University; Bettina Poirier, American University; Christopher P Bertram, Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies

• Party Dynamics in Congressional Negotiations - James M. Curry, University of Notre Dame; Andrew McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Florida State University

• Collective Representation Negotiated by Black Women Legislators - Nadia E. Brown, Georgetown University; Christopher Jude Clark, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Anna M. Mahoney, Dartmouth College

• When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed or Fail? A Sweep Approach - Matthew N. Green, Catholic University of America

Chair

• Jane Mansbridge Harvard Kennedy School

Discussant

• David C. Barker American University