Equality in legislative bargaining

Abstract

I study a distributive model of legislative bargaining in which the surplus generated by a winning coalition equals the sum of productivities of coalition members. The heterogeneous ability of players to generate surplus leads to asymmetric bargaining prospects in otherwise symmetric environments. More productive players are recruited more often by other players despite having higher expected payoffs; however, the players who are recruited in every coalition have equal expected payoffs despite having different productivity. I show that an increase in the required quota raises equality as measured by the Gini coefficient. The distribution of expected payoffs is more equal than the distribution of productivities but this advantage disappears under the less-than-unanimity voting as players become perfectly patient.