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Dr. Jernej Čopič

University of California at Los Angeles, USA

Authors: Jernej Čopič and Jonathan Katz

Abstract: An ubiquitous feature of all legislatures is that plenary time is scarce. However, no models of legislative bargaining explicitly include this scarcity and the competition for floor time it induces. In this paper, we develop a general model of legislative scheduling with scarcity. The intuition for our model comes out of framing the problem as a special type of a multi-good auction. We show that in our model, equilibria exist. We also show how to use our framework to generalize Shepsle's (1979) model of legislative bargaining to include competition. Competition causes policy to move toward the scheduling agent's preferences. As a consequence, in examples of distributive politics, the scheduling agent appropriates most of the available rents. In non-distributive examples, the scheduling agent's preferences affect the outcome more than the preferences of proposers of policy moves.

Full Text: “Auctioning off the Agenda: Bargaining in Legislatures with Endogenous Scheduling”