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Strategic Voting in a Bicameral Setting

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Reform Processes and Policy Change

Part of the book series: Studies in Public Choice ((SIPC,volume 16))

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Abstract

Recent work on roll call votes has demonstrated the importance of considering more explicitly the agenda tree that leads to the votes considered. When doing so, the issue of whether members of parliament behave sincerely or in a sophisticated manner comes to the forefront. While a series of studies have, on the basis of examples mostly taken from the US Congress, tried to analyze with the help of theoretical models sophisticated voting, few studies have considered this type of voting in a bicameral setting. This study proposes a game–theoretic model of sophisticated voting in a bicameral parliament. Assuming incomplete information on the preferences across the two chambers, the analysis demonstrates that in bicameral settings sophisticated voting cannot be considered chamber by chamber, but has to be analyzed in the context of the whole voting process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some early thoughts of this study were presented at a seminar at the University of Mannheim, at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago (April 2–5, 2009) and at the conference “Reform processes and policy change: How do veto players determine decision-making in modern democracies” University of Mannheim (May 14–16, 2009).

  2. 2.

    Interestingly, none of the classical works on Congress seem to mention this complication, with the sole exceptions, to my knowledge, of the early work by Gross (1982) and Miller (1984) as well as the contribution of Martin (2001).

  3. 3.

    Comparative, in this context, may mean both work on parliaments other than the US Congress, and work comparing different legislatures.

  4. 4.

    Related to this problem is obviously the effect of party discipline, which may lead to odd estimates of ideal-points based on roll call votes (see Rosenthal and Voeten 2004; Spirling and McLean 2006, 2007).

  5. 5.

    See, however, Martin and Quinn (2005) argument that at least Bayesian ideal-point estimates of Supreme Court justices are not unduly affected by the latter’s gate-keeping powers.

  6. 6.

    Only recently a series of scholars have attempted to identify instances of strategic behavior (e.g., Jenkins and Munger 2003; Finocchiaro and Jenkins 2008; Leemann 2009). See also the related literature on log-rolling nicely reviewed by Stratmann (1997), who also devises a test for cyclical behavior in parliaments (Stratmann 1996).

  7. 7.

    The only model dealing with this aspect that I am aware of, namely Martin’s (2001), “solves” this problem by having an exogenous bill adopted if a conciliation committee needs to be called (see below for more details).

  8. 8.

    For instance, they fail to consider Gross’s (1982), Miller’s (1984) and Martin’s (2001) work on sophisticated behavior in a bicameral setting.

  9. 9.

    See Heller (2007) for a review focusing on the empirical results (e.g., Levmore 1992; Heller 2001; Congleton 2003).

  10. 10.

    Interestingly, these studies are hardly referred to in the current literature.

  11. 11.

    Interesting to note is that Martin’s (2001) article is almost exclusively cited (at least according to Google Scholar) by scholars dealing with the Supreme Court. For some reason, this important contribution has not found an audience among congressional (or legislative) scholars.

  12. 12.

    In some sense related is Hoyland and Hagemann’s (2010 (forthcoming)) study on bicameralism in the European Union. They can demonstrate that Council votes (i.e., votes in the upper house) affect the way in which the European parliament (the lower house) votes. While their focus is on the particularities of the so-called co-decision procedure, their work still suggests that separate analyses of one chamber may be misleading.

  13. 13.

    In his empirical analysis, however, Martin (2001) attempts to deal with the first point by limiting his analysis to a subset of votes where the assumption largely holds, and the results carry over.

  14. 14.

    Cutrone and McCarty (2006, 180), in their review chapter on bicameralism, adopt an unnecessarily stringent definition of bicameralism by limiting it to parliaments where the two chambers have equal powers. Obviously, such a stringent definition, if applied indiscriminately, would eliminate almost all bicameral systems from consideration (for a description of the wide diversity of bicameral competencies, see Trivelli 1974; Tsebelis and Money 1997; Patterson and Mughan 1999).

  15. 15.

    This is very similar to Tsebelis and Money’s (1997) setup, where the bargain of the conciliation committee is characterized with the Nash bargaining solution (for the relationship between the mean and the Nash bargaining solution see Achen 2006).

  16. 16.

    Though see Hoyland and Hagemann (2010 (forthcoming)) analysis suggesting that the Council has in this case conditional agenda-setting control (for a related argument concerning the cooperation procedure but regarding the EP, see Tsebelis 1994).

  17. 17.

    The detailed derivations for the results appear in the appendix.

  18. 18.

    It may seem odd that C does not vote on the proposal of the conciliation committee. Such a vote, however, is anticipated by C in the decision to vote for A, hence adding such a vote would be redundant.

  19. 19.

    In Enelow and Koehler’s (1980) the prior beliefs concern the behavior of other members of the same chamber.

  20. 20.

    As shown above, empirical examples for such a distribution of powers exist among the bicameral parliaments around the world.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the participants at these events, especially Marcelo Jenny, as well as Bjørn Hoyland for the helpful comments and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No 100012-111909) for its generous funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de science politique, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

    Simon Hug

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Correspondence to Simon Hug .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, 68131, Germany

    Thomas König

  2. Mannheim Center for European Research, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, 68131, Germany

    Marc Debus

  3. Dept. Political Science, University of Michigan, S. State St. 505, Ann Arbor, 48109-1045, USA

    George Tsebelis

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Hug, S. (2011). Strategic Voting in a Bicameral Setting. In: König, T., Debus, M., Tsebelis, G. (eds) Reform Processes and Policy Change. Studies in Public Choice, vol 16. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5809-9_11

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