Proposal Rights, Veto Rights, and Political Bargaining

Abstract

Formal models of political bargaining generally emphasize the importance of the allocation of prerogatives such as proposal and veto rights among the bargainers. However, despite the importance of these arguments for the study of political institutions, little work has been done to clarify precisely what general roles each of these prerogatives play in generating political outcomes. In this article, I develop a sequential-choice bargaining model that incorporates very general allocations of both proposal and veto rights. The model helps clarify the important strategic distinctions between these rights and identify the conditions under which they have substantial impacts on outcomes. My analysis demonstrates how these prerogatives interact and how the failure to account for this interaction can lead to mistaken inferences about their individual effects. Finally, the model suggests that the value of these rights is heavily influenced by a number of other features of the institutional bargaining environment. he notion that the protocols for the production and adoption of policy proposals have profound effects on outcomes is hardly novel in political science. In the past two decades, dozens of models of various political institutions have been formulated that show how specific allocations of proposal rights-the ability to initiate new policies-and veto rights-the ability to block proposed policies-affect political outcomes. However, despite the general recognition of the importance of these prerogatives in political bargaining, there have been relatively few attempts to develop general propositions as to their effects. In this article, I develop a model of political bargaining designed to isolate the distinctions between the rights to make proposals and those to invoke vetoes. There are two main questions that I wish to address. First, what is the impact of how these rights are allocated across actors in a political bargaining situation? Secondly, what are the conditions under which one of these prerogatives are more valuable to a political actor than another?' To illustrate these questions concretely, consider the model of political bargaining first developed by Romer and Rosenthal (1978) and used in numerous applications to the study of political institutions. In the simplest version, two actors negotiate to change an exogenously given status quo policy. Prerogatives are allocated such that one player is allowed to make a proposal while the other may veto it. The game lasts for only a single period as the status quo remains in effect following any unsuccessful proposal. This model has a number of implications with regard to the effects of proposal and veto rights. The first is that policy often depends on which of the actors is the proposer and which is the vetoer. As long as there are policies that both actors prefer to the status quo, the outcome is determined by the