When Do Legislative Negotiations Succeed? A Case Study Approach

• In Event: Congress and Policy-Making

Abstract

The ability to successfully negotiate conflict is critical for a legislature to work. In the U.S. Congress, policy conflicts can emerge between parties, within parties, and across chambers, as well as between Congress and the president. Legislative entrepreneurs and party leaders must be able to navigate these potential flashpoints of disagreement and find ways to reach sufficient agreement in order to win majorities in the House and Senate for their desired bills.

As important as legislative negotiation is for Congress, congressional studies have tended to give the subject little attention. An important exception is research that has been done on bargaining over distributive legislation, like appropriations bills, where benefits can be divided among the various players. But this research cannot explain negotiations over issues that do not lend themselves to division or compromise, fails to consider the role of integrative solutions to negotiations, and usually employs spatial models that rely on limiting, if not unrealistic, assumptions.

One possible approach to uncovering the causes of successful legislative negotiation is to examine prior cases of bargaining in Congress, looking at variation in internal and external variables that might correlate with the success or failure of such negotiations. Unfortunately, apart from a handful of studies of individual cases of legislative bargaining, we lack 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 two new datasets of individual cases of legislative negotiation in Congress over the past four decades. The first is a smaller sample of instances of negotiation involving high-profile, highly salient legislation for which substantial details of the negotiation process are available. The cases are selected to maximize variation across several key variables, including which party controls the House and Senate, the party of the president, and the content of the legislation subject to negotiation. This “diverse” approach to case selection is ideal for both generating and testing hypotheses (George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007).

In order to make broader generalizations about the reasons that negotiation succeeds or fails, a second, larger set of cases between 1980 and 2018 will be collected for which aggregate data is available for testing varying explanations of bargaining success and failure. This second set of cases will be captured 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.

Three types of sources will be used to identify potential cases. The first are published accounts of particular bills that identify and explain any legislative bargaining that took place. The second are major Congress-oriented publications, such as Congressional Quarterly and National Journal. Third, key votes in Congress identified each year by Congressional Quarterly will be employed a benchmark for identifying major bills considered by Congress that may have resulted from legislative negotiations, though with the important caveat that such votes are biased towards bargaining that resulted in legislation receiving a floor vote.

Unlike the first, more detailed set of case studies, this second set of data will be used to test broader contextual factors that have been hypothesized to influence the likelihood of success in the legislative bargaining process. Those factors include characteristics of the bargaining participants, such as their electoral vulnerability (Anderson, Butler, and Harbridge-Yong forthcoming), legislative style (Sulkin and Bernhard 2018), legislative effectiveness (Volden and Wiseman 2014), seniority, leadership position, ideology, and district partisanship.

More generally, the data will be used to test at least several hypotheses about the relationship between the negotiation process and its outcome, including (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.

The ultimate objectives of the project are (a) to uncover common features of the bargaining process and congressional politics that increase the likelihood that legislative negotiations result in the passage of legislation and (b) to create a new database of legislative negotiations that can be used by political scientists, historians, and other scholars of congressional policy-making.

Author

• Matthew N. Green, Catholic University of America