Time and Political Power: Setting the Calendar in a Busy Legislature

32 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2013

See all articles by Maxwell Palmer

Maxwell Palmer

Boston University - Department of Political Science

Date Written: 2013

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the importance of finite plenary time on the endogenous creation of legislative procedures, leadership positions, and calendar setting. In a busy legislature, finite time constrains the number of issues that can be taken up on the floor. Setting the legislative calendar - the process of choosing which issues will be addressed and which will be set aside - is a challenging collective choice problem for the legislature. I develop a formal model which shows that a majority of the legislature will generally prefer to give the power of setting the calendar to a leader - the “Speaker” - at the start of the legislative session rather than face a calendar-less legislative session where all legislators have equal proposal power. I show that in the case where legislators have one-dimensional preferences, majority supported calendars always exist and that voting over the calendar partitions the legislature into two procedural coalitions. In multi-dimensional settings, majority supported calendars generally exist, but there are cases where no passable calendar exists and the only equilibrium is a calendar-less session. I use computational simulations to support the formal model and demonstrate that the findings are robust to a variety of assumptions on legislative preferences and the distribution of policy choices.

Keywords: congress, legislatures, legislative organization, leadership, plenary time

Suggested Citation

Palmer, Maxwell, Time and Political Power: Setting the Calendar in a Busy Legislature (2013). APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper, American Political Science Association 2013 Annual Meeting, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2300009

Maxwell Palmer (Contact Author)

Boston University - Department of Political Science ( email )

United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
88
Abstract Views
1,100
Rank
625,801
PlumX Metrics