Agenda Setters Research Articles

Delegation, Agency and Agenda Setting in the Treaty of Amsterdam

This paper applies a principal-agent model of delegation, agency and agenda setting to the 1996 intergovernmental conference and the Treaty of Amsterdam, in order to understand both the delegation of powers to supranational organizations in the new Treaty, and the efforts of such organizations to set the agenda for the conference. At Amsterdam, the member governments of the European Union delegated new powers to the Commission, the Court of Justice, and especially the European Parliament; these new powers, however, are carefully hedged with elaborate mechanisms to control, if not eliminate, supranational autonomy in the future. In the intergovernmental conference, moreover, the EU?s supranational organizations attempted to influence the outcome of the negotiations as informal agenda setters, but they were limited in their ability to do so by the information-rich content of the IGC. However, while the influence of the Commission, Court and Parliament was indeed limited in the intergovernmental conference and at Amsterdam, we should beware of generalizing from IGCs to the day-to-day workings of EU politics, where the powers of the supranational organizations are far greater than in any intergovernmental conference.

A View from the Top

ABSTRACT Women are no longer token participants in the governing process in U.S. state legislatures. Rather, they comprise more than one fifth of the state legislative membership and have become a visible force in leadership, holding about fifteen percent of all leadership positions. Unfortunately, there has been no systematic effort to examine the differences between the issue priorities of men and women leaders. Given the growing number of women in leadership and the importance of leaders as agenda setters, this question warrants attention. Our results indicate that while women are a growing part of modern legislative leadership teams, they are less prominent in key leadership positions. Women leaders in our sample do have legislative agendas distinct from their male counterparts. Specifically, women leaders are more likely to report issues of traditional concern to women: health care, social services, women's family and children's issues, and the environment as priorities. They are less likely than are men to emphasize taxes, budget matters, public safety, institutional regulation and matters of insurance or product liability as legislative priorities. Further, we find that differences between women and men leaders remain significant when controls for party, race, experience, type of leadership position and region are included in the model.

Domestic Policy Making

This article asks how changes in the presidential policy‐making process have affected domestic policy in general and the agenda‐setting process in particular. The past forty years have witnessed two roughly parallel but possibly unrelated trends. First, the presidential policy‐making process has become more formalized as presidents have added staff and capacity to the institutional presidency. Second, the number of proposals on the president's domestic policy agenda has declined in both number and newness. Simply stated, the president's agenda has declined in significance even as the policy process has increased in capacity. This article examines the possible explanations for the trends while suggesting that institutionalization may not have been the wisest organizational response to the political pressures that led to a shrinking of the president's agenda.

Getting to the Core

Important decisions are often determined by group vote. Institutional provisions may stipulate who has the authority to determine the group's agenda. According to cooperative game theory, this privilege gives the leader a great deal of power to control the outcome. In a series of experiments, the authors demonstrate the influence of norms on coalitions and decisions. Subjects were assigned to groups with two agenda setters, two issues, and concentric indifference curves. Three theories were tested: coalitional rationality, group fairness, and coalitional integrity. The pattern of coalition formation, coalition dissolution, and decisions was consistent only with coalitional integrity. The integrity norm (members will not join a coalition requiring them to vote against the interests of prior coalition members) generates friction in coalition dynamics. Clearly, when formulating an agenda, leaders must consider a potential partner's coalitional history. Theories of group decision making must be sensitive to social constraints as well as self-interest.

Subcommittee Agenda Control

The conventional wisdom holds that standing committees and subcommittees gain disproportionate influence over the policy decisions for which they have agenda control. Two solution concepts which make predictions about the influence of decentralized agenda setters are the structure-induced equilibrium (SIE) and the structural core; they differ in their predictions because the latter (but not the former) assumes that logrolling across agenda jurisdictions will occur. Experimental evidence suggests that agenda setters do bargain across jurisdictions (contrary to the SIE), and that the outcome of this bargaining process determines the value of agenda control to the agenda setters. When both subcommittee agenda setters have preferences that diverge sharply from those of the parent committee, agenda setters have an unambiguous incentive to cooperate with each other. When one subcommittee agenda setter has preferences more representative of the parent committee, the more extreme agenda setter is at a bargaining disadvantage.

Agenda Control, Committee Capture, and the Dynamics of Institutional Politics

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

Agenda Control, Committee Capture, and the Dynamics of Institutional Politics

Most models of agenda control examine dyadic relations—for example, those between a committee and the floor of a legislature. Such relations, however, are always embedded in a larger context, namely, a political environment composed of voters and interest groups. In this paper we model agenda setters (a legislative committee) as decision makers with limited cognitive abilities who adjust over time to their larger political environment. The legislators' policy positions are endogenous, reflecting the relative strengths of voters wielding the district-specific resource of votes and of interest groups wielding the transferable resource of money. The resulting outcomes indicate that neoclassical models of voting and pluralist models of group influence have each told part of the story. When only votes matter, our boundedly rational agents grope toward equilibria close to those of neoclassical models; however, when mobile resources matter as well, the outcomes depart systematically from those of previous models. In particular, interest groups can make themselves worse off by capturing the committee. The results suggest that agenda control is less powerful than conventionally believed and point toward conditions shaping its effectiveness—conditions highlighting the distinctive contributions of pluralist and neoclassical thinking to a broader theory of political institutions.

Why so much stability?: Another opinion

In this paper I have suggested three important factors that render majority rule stable in real world settings; small numbers of alternatives, constraints on agenda setters, and a meaningful weakening of the single-peakedness condition. These simple points, along with Shepsle's complementary notion of structure-induced equilibria and an extension thereof incorporating strategic behavior (Krehbiel, 1983), go a long way toward explaining the existence of stable outcomes in the real world. The disequilibrium results are still extremely important in making us realize the long term fragility of social choices. If other alternatives can virtually always defeat the selected alternative given the ‘right’ structuring of the choice situation, then one task of politicians is to try to structure later choices so as to overturn the original decisions (Riker, 1982: Chapters 8–9). Still, this is a slow process at best, and some decisions are never reconsidered. Therefore, this caveat notwithstanding, constrained (in terms of voting orders) selection from a small number of alternatives — especially from a set near clusters of ideal points and with preference curves often approximating single-peakedness — is a more realistic picture of legislative choice than is unconstrained choice among an infinity of alternatives. Finally, I note that some of the factors I have discussed can be incorporated under the general heading of institutional structures. Procedures for ordering alternatives to be voted on, for example, are part of an institution's rules. The existence of multiple agenda setters may also be part of the formal structure (e.g., committee chairmen), but it may not be (e.g., factions may come and go). In contrast, the selection of alternatives near members' ideal points is never written into formal procedures. Nor is any form of single-peakedness ever structurally mandated. Thus institutional structures and other factors combine to create at least short-run stability in the real world.