Party Dynamics in Congressional Negotiations

• In Event: Understanding Legislative Negotiation

Abstract

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. With these data we are able to conduct statistical analyses and produce case studies that 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.

Authors

• James M. Curry, University of Notre Dame

• Andrew McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Florida State University