Successful Bargaining Research Articles

Bargaining success in the reform of the Eurozone

This article provides a systematic assessment of bargaining success in the reform of the Eurozone 2010 to 2015. Theoretically, we develop an argument about preferences and institutions as determinants of bargaining success and contrast this argument with an alternative account privileging states’ power resources. Empirically, we conduct a statistical analysis of new data covering all key reform proposals. Our findings are three-fold. First, contrary to a conventional narrative of German dominance, the negotiations produced no clear winners and losers. Second, while power resources were of limited importance, holding preferences that were centrist or close to the European Commission favored bargaining success—particularly when adoption only required the support of a qualified majority. Third, these descriptive and explanatory results reflect dynamics of compromise and reciprocity.

Bargaining Success in the Reform of the Eurozone

This article provides a systematic assessment of bargaining success in the reform of the Eurozone 2010 to 2015. Theoretically, we develop an argument about preferences and institutions as determinants of bargaining success and contrast this argument with an alternative account privileging states’ power resources. Empirically, we conduct a statistical analysis of new data covering all key reform proposals. Our findings are three-fold. First, contrary to a conventional narrative of German dominance, the negotiations produced no clear winners and losers. Secondly, while power resources were of limited importance, holding preferences that were centrist or close to the European Commission favored bargaining success — particularly when adoption only required the support of a qualified majority. Thirdly, these descriptive and explanatory results reflect dynamics of compromise and reciprocity.

Do votes matter? Voting weights and the success probability of member state requests in the Council of the European Union

The impact of votes on Council decision-making is a widely studied subject. A large body of theory supports the contention that more votes, ceteris paribus, translate into more influence. Empirical studies have, however, shown a negative relationship between the voting power of a member state and its bargaining success. Based on a new data set, this study shows empirically that there is a robust positive relationship between the number of votes backing a member state request to change European legislation and its success probability. The analysis is based on all unique member state requests for exemptions, lower standards or longer transitional time periods in the field of environmental policy between the first wave of Eastern Enlargement in 2004 and the entry into force of the Lisbon treaty in 2009 (N = 216). It also shows that member state requests are often successful, contrary to the image of an unresponsive Brussels.

Opportunistic Accountability: The Roots of a Non-Fiscal Social Contract in Nigeria

In the absence of electoral accountability, when can citizens impose their policy preferences on the state? In the standard narrative, the cost of paying taxes motivates citizens to make new demands on the state. We argue that this dynamic of sacrifice is not necessary and even being the beneficiary of a valued service can improve a citizen’s bargaining position. We hypothesize that where coercion is costly and where the state values policy compliance, citizens can strategically use non-compliance to extract other, more highly valued, benefits from the state. These instances represent nascent bargaining processes. Because this non-compliance is unprincipled and successful bargaining is dependent on the state valuing citizens’ compliance, we term this process opportunistic accountability. Drawing on evidence from the polio vaccination campaign in Northern Nigeria, we illustrate a new channel through which policy can empower citizens and initiate a non-fiscal social contract, even in rentier and patronage states.

Mass Opinion and Immigration Policy in the United States: Re-Assessing Clientelist and Elitist Perspectives

We argue that widely accepted elitist and “clientelist” models of immigration policy in the United States unduly minimize popular pressure on policy-making. These models portray majority opinion in ways that fail to recognize divergence between the public’s abstract goals for immigration policy and its support for the concrete policy changes needed to achieve them. As a result, they obscure many important instances in which immigration policy accords with public preferences despite counter-pressure from elites and organized lobbies. We demonstrate this point by identifying and explaining gaps between generalized attitudes and beliefs about specific policies in the domains of both legal and illegal immigration, showing that status quo legal admissions policies are not starkly at odds with majority preferences and that, contrary to interpretations of most commercial polling on the topic, majorities reject specific aspects of legalization programs that organized lobbies insist on as components of a “grand bargain” to overhaul an immigration system widely viewed as “broken.” Appreciating the nuance in mass opinion toward immigration policy helps explain policy stagnation that confounds elitist models and suggests that forging ahead with immigration reform will require persuading the public and not only successful bargaining among elites and interest groups.

Are changes in the dispersion of hours worked a cause of increased earnings inequality?

Earnings are the product of wages and hours of work; hence, the dispersion of hours can magnify or dampen a given distribution of wages. This paper examines how earnings inequality is affected by the dispersion of working hours using data for the USA, the UK, Germany, and France over the period 1989–2012. We find that hours dispersion can account for over a third of earnings inequality in some countries and that its contribution has been growing over time. We interpret the expansion in hours inequality in European countries as being the result of weaker union power that led to less successful bargaining concerning working hours.

Explaining the European Parliament’s Legislative Clout

This article investigates which factors shape the European Parliament’s (EP) bargaining success under the codecision procedure, focusing on three sets of predictors that operate at the levels of the rapporteur and the responsible EP committee: ideological distances to the Council of Ministers, qualifications of MEPs, and institutional factors. Our results indicate that greater ideological distance between EP delegates and the Council depresses bargaining success; that inter-institutional contestation becomes more focused on the left-right dimension over time; that several factors that one might expect to benefit EP bargaining success in fact show a negative correlation; and that rapporteur-level variables are the most important predictors during the 1999–2004 EP term, while committee-level predictors matter from 2004–2009 – a difference we ascribe to successively greater oversight of rapporteurs by their parent committees.

A Logical Multidemand Bargaining Model with Integrity Constraints

This paper proposes a logical model of multi-demand bargaining with integrity constraints. We also construct a simultaneous concession solution to bargaining games of this kind and show that the solution is uniquely characterized by a set of logical properties. Moreover, we prove that the solution also satisfies the most fundamental game theoretic properties such as symmetry and Pareto optimality. In addition, by lots of simulation experiments we study how the number of conflicting demands, bargainers' risk attitude, and bargainer number influence the bargaining success rate and efficiency as well as the agreement quality.

Fenno on the House Appropriations Committee's Success: (Or, How to Construct a Nash Equilibrium Without Really Trying)

Fenno's classic paper, "The Appropriations Committee as a Political System" (1962), focuses on the norms and institutions that are the foundations of House Appropriations Committee’s (HAC) success. The fundamental idea is that of committee integration, the degree to which committee members cooperate so as to capture the gains from cooperation. According to Fenno, cooperation requires procedures and norms for successful bargaining, first within committee then before the whole chamber. As Fenno reports, cooperation requires that committee members adhere to several norms: committee integration, the ability to make decisions without creating disorder; members specialize by subcommittee, focusing on matters before their subcommittee, not those matters before other subcommittees; committee members practice reciprocity, by which members not on a given subcommittee defer to and support the recommendations of that subcommittee; and members exhibit to subcommittee unity, the practice that, no matter what the disagreements in the subcommittee about the bill, all subcommittee members support the subcommittee’s recommendations in the full committee. This paper shows that Fenno constructs a Nash equilibrium of committee integration that explains why committee members had incentives to follow the HAC norms.

Skills in the marketplace: Market efficiency, social orientation, and ability in a field-based experiment

Neoclassical economic theory predicts that markets will clear, leaving little or no marginal gains from trade. Laboratory experiments have largely confirmed this prediction, though the results of recent field experiments have been mixed, especially in developing countries. I create a multiround trading market in Uganda to explore the efficiency of trading and test whether traders’ personal traits are associated with market efficiency and individual bargaining success. To test the effects of individual traits, I utilize data on measures of the traders’ human and physical capital, risk and time preferences, and social orientation, specifically pro- and antisocial behavior and aggression. I find that the buyers’ and sellers’ relative levels of social orientation and human capital are associated with levels of market efficiency within rounds. Measures of social orientation, however, are less associated with individual success. I also find that rents obtained in the experiment are strongly associated with the wealth levels of participants two years later, but this association is limited to those who were randomly assigned to be buyers in the experiment. I present evidence that this association is driven by greater buyer bargaining ability.

Success and failure of bargaining in merger control: The case of asset divestitures

This paper studies the bargaining over merger asset divestiture in the shadow of appeal litigation. We provide theoretical foundations for a recurrent empirical finding, namely that the opportunity cost born by the merging firms due to merger control has direct consequences for the remedy divestiture agreement. Increased severity of the appeal court improves the imperfect merger screening implemented by the agency through remedy negotiation, which possibly argues in favor of a judicial complement to the “regulatory” merger policy enforcement. But the main recommendation for agencies is to devise tools to better deal with the asymmetric information that limits the effectiveness of their merger policy enforcement.

Turnover in the Council of the European Union: What It is and Why It Matters

AbstractThis article analyzes personnel turnover in the Council of the European Union. It draws upon analysis of an original monthly database of ministers in EU Member States from 2004 to 2012. After surveying the literature on the negative effects of high legislative turnover, descriptive statistics are presented that demonstrate high levels of turnover in the Council as a whole and high levels of turnover across all nine sectoral Council configurations. A statistical model is then proposed that tests whether variations in levels of Council turnover affect the institution's bargaining success vis‐à‐vis other EU institutions. The finding, consistent with the broader literature's predictions, is that high levels of turnover hurt the Council vis‐à‐vis the European Parliament and the European Commission. The article concludes with general remarks about the implications of turnover for the Council system and for the EU more broadly.

Consultations with Interest Groups and the Empowerment of Executives: Evidence from theEuropeanUnion

We examine how an executive's consultations with interest groups during the formative stage of the policy process affect its bargaining success during the decision‐making stage after it has proposed new policies to legislative actors. Our theory sets out how consultations with interest groups strengthen the executive by bolstering its formal and informal agenda‐setting power. The empirical testing ground for our theory is theEuropeanUnion (EU), and in particular the consultations held by theEuropeanCommission. The analysis assesses the effects of these consultations on the congruence between theCommission's legislative proposals on controversial issues andEUlaws. Our analysis incorporates detailed information on the type and scope of each consultation. In line with our theory, we find that theCommission had more success during the decision‐making stage after conducting open consultations with large numbers of interest groups during the policy formation stage.

Bicameralism, intra-party bargaining, and the formation of party policy positions

How do political parties arrive at their policy positions? We conceptualize position formation in federalist countries as an intra-party bargaining process in which subnational parties compete with each other in an attempt to get their own positions into their national party manifesto. Drawing on theories about inter-party bargaining over ministerial portfolios, we hypothesize that the bargaining success of subnational parties depends on their parliamentary strength. We evaluate our hypotheses based on a comprehensive dataset on policy positions of national and subnational parties in Germany from 1990 until 2009. Our results show that German subnational parties that are powerful in the second parliamentary chamber ( Bundesrat) are particularly successful in shaping the manifesto of their national party. The findings have important implications for our understanding of intra-party politics and position formation within political parties in Germany more specifically and federalist countries more generally.

The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat. By William G.Howell, Saul P.Jackman, and Jon C.Rogowski. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 344 pp.

The Wartime President: Executive Influence the Nationalizing Politics of Threat. By William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, Jon C. Rogowski. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 344 pp. made the state, Charles Tilly famously declaimed; and the state made war. In their rich new work, William Howell, Saul Jackman, Jon Rogowski shift this proposition slightly on its axis. If war makes the presidency, they wonder, can the president make policy? A pantheon of notables--Hamilton, Madison, Tocqueville, Bryce, Corwin, Schlesinger--have long argued that wars enhance presidential power. The Wartime President does not disagree--but it does argue that this effect has been assumed, rather than analyzed, its contingencies rarely explored. Under what conditions does war allow the president to get more of what he wants, to what extent, and--crucially--why? Are all wars, all presidents, created equal? Is there variance even within a given war? Across different areas? As cannot view presidential influence directly; like quarks, we can only see its traces (p. 18), it is actually congressional behavior that is measured here, using a policy priority model that seeks to identify the general circumstances under which Congress should enact the president's preferences. The key building blocks are that (1) policies have both national local outcomes (2) presidents members of Congress tend to place different weights on those. Most broadly, presidents usually have more expertise when it comes to national concerns, while legislators equip themselves to understand local affairs. Thus, Congress assigns increased significance to national vis-a-vis local outcomes, presidential bargaining success increases (p. 39). Whatever events serve to privilege the national over the local--and war should be high on the list--will cause members of Congress to adhere more closely to presidential policy. But this will not be monotonic. Not every war shifts the salience of national stakes in the same way. World War II, for instance, should induce more legislative deference than the first Gulf War. The empirical chapters test these hypotheses by examining how far budget enactments diverge from presidential appropriations requests through analyzing shifts in individual legislators' roll call choices. The latter is particularly impressive in constructing a persuasive means of comparing apples to apples as members of Congress bridge the shift from peace to war back again. The authors find that legislators do fund the government at levels closer to presidential requests during wartime--in domestic agencies as well as in defense. And in roll call voting they find intriguing variance across wars, suggesting that war generally does raise the salience of national concerns for most legislators enhances presidential influence, even while specific wars differ in their ability to do so. The bigger the war, the bigger the impact, the bar seems relatively high. …

An equality bargaining breakthrough: Paid domestic violence leave

In 2010, the first clauses providing paid leave and other entitlements to victims of domestic violence were included in union negotiated enterprise agreements registered with the Australian Fair Work Commission. By mid-2013, over one hundred enterprise agreements in Australia included such a clause. Applying a model of ‘equality bargaining’, this article presents a case study of the development and negotiation of one of the first domestic violence clauses providing paid leave in the world. The analysis finds key facilitators of equality bargaining in this case were the contributions from external forces, the availability of a ‘model clause’ and the commitment of The Union’s representatives. Of lesser significance, but still apparent, was the bargaining relationship and the reputation of the parties. Contrary to the findings in other research, neither the decentralised bargaining framework nor the absence of a supportive legislative framework was an impediment to successful bargaining of the domestic violence clause in this case.

The consequences of concluding codecision early: trilogues and intra-institutional bargaining success

One of the most important changes in the history of codecision has been the steep increase in early agreements since 1999. Early agreements have enhanced the efficiency of European Union legislation, but they have been criticized for giving a subset of actors disproportionate control over the legislative agenda and negotiation process. Yet, no study has systematically shown whether and how early agreements have indeed redistributed influence between actors within the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Our contribution fills this gap by comparing actors’ bargaining success across readings under codecision in a dataset of salient files. Contrary to our theoretical predictions, we do not find evidence of distributional consequences when controlling for inter-institutional conflict and file characteristics. Where codecision is concluded early, the final legislative outcomes are not located closer to the policy positions held by the party group of the Parliament's rapporteur or by the Council Presidency.

The distribution of power among EU institutions: who wins under codecision and why?

The codecision procedure was designed to change the distribution of power among the European Union (EU) institutions. In theory, the codecision procedure, at least the amended version introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty that came into effect in 1999, weakened the Commission and placed the Parliament on an equal footing with the Council. We assess how the codecision procedure works in practice using data on the preferences of legislative actors on a large number of proposals negotiated between 1999 and 2009. We also test theoretical propositions derived from Schelling regarding the effects of policy agreement within each chamber on the relative bargaining success of the Council and EP. Our findings suggest that, in comparison to the consultation procedure, codecision has strengthened the EP and weakened the Commission. However, the Council holds certain bargaining advantages over the EP, and as a result the EP has not achieved parity with the Council under codecision.

Domestic Politics and International Bargaining in China’s Territorial Disputes

Domestic Politics and International Bargaining in China's Territorial Disputes. By Chien-Peng Chung. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge-Curzon, 2004. Soflcover: 222pp. In 2006, as a first year Ph.D. student, I swallowed hard and clicked on the purchase icon at a popular online bookseller. The $150 price tag was worth it, I told myself. I was going to write a dissertation about Chinese territorial and Chung's book would be useful. As it turns out it was, and remains, invaluable. While it is rare to review books nine years after publication, the release of the paperback version of Chung's treatise on the domestic politics of China's territorial merits discussion as to whether the next generation of students of Chinese foreign policy should spend considerably less on the paperback version. In light of developments in the South and East China Seas in recent years, does Chung's model--based on Robert Putnam's two-level games framework --still explain Chinese behaviour towards its territorial disputes? Chung argues that, consistent with Putnam's expectations, bargaining outcomes are shaped by societal preferences and government coalitions, the ratification procedures of political institutions and the strategies of the negotiators, which affect bargaining outcomes in China's territorial (p. 145). Chung contrasts the recurrent bargaining failures in the East China Sea, with successful bargaining with Russia over the Zhaobao/Damansky border area. Territorial with India and over the South China were quieted at the time of writing and thus fall somewhere in between (p. 145). The cases studies confirm the expectation that domestic factors, such as the diffusion of the costs of cooperation across different constituencies, regime type, and the impact of coherent domestic opposition to an agreement can affect bargaining outcomes over territorial issues. Importantly, these findings remain relevant in China's two outstanding maritime disputes, over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands with Japan and with several other claimants in the South China Sea. Chung observes that the impact of particularly negative historical memories can be sufficiently strong so as to prevent official negotiations from even taking place (p. 147), a fact overlooked by Putnam's original theory. Chung's work also pre-empts recent work on public opinion and Chinese foreign policy by asking the question whether democracies are responsive to public opinion than their authoritarian counterparts. In a particularly prescient comment, due to the developing pluralism in the Chinese foreign policymaking process, it will be more difficult in future to coordinate the making and execution of foreign policy in China, especially with regard to sensitive issues like territorial disputes (pp. 150-151, emphasis added). This insight precedes detailed work on domestic sources of Chinese policy on the South China by the International Crisis Group's Stirring Up the South China Sea published in 2012. Indeed, Chung's framework is a useful prism through which to view bargaining over territory by other states as well. For example, the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking, an agreement among Chinese, Vietnamese and Philippine oil companies to explore for oil in the South China Sea, collapsed after it was revealed that part of the area was uncontested Philippine waters. Faced with accusations from opposition political parties of bargaining away Philippine territory ruling elites in Manila allowed the agreement to lapse in June 2008. The Japanese government's decision to nationalize three of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 2012 is also an example of domestic actors narrowing the terms of acceptable outcomes for policy-makers, by making it virtually impossible to ignore territorial issues. …

How the European Union does not work: national bargaining success in the Council of Ministers

We know surprisingly little about whether the content of European Union (EU) legislation reflects the preferences of some member states more than others. The few studies that have examined national bargaining success rates for EU legislation have conceptual and methodological weaknesses. To redress these problems I use a salience-weighted measure to gauge the relative success of member states in translating their national preferences into legislation, and test two plausible, competing hypotheses about how the EU works: that no state consistently achieves more of what it really wants than any other; and that large member states tend to beat small ones. Neither hypothesis receives empirical support. Not only do states differ far more significantly in their respective levels of bargaining success than previously recognized, but some of the smaller states are the ones that do especially well. The article's main contribution – demonstrating that the EU does not work as most people think it does – sets the stage for new research questions, both positive and normative. In the last section I make a tentative start to answering two of the most important: which factors explain the surprising empirical results; and whether differential national bargaining success might undermine the legitimacy of the integration process.