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

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