The Politics of Blame: Bargaining before an Audience

Groseclose, Tim; McCarty, Nolan

doi:10.2307/2669362

Cited by 279 publications

(184 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In other words, we do not consider constellations of the "blame game" type (Groseclose and McCarty 2001), in which a government may value the mobilizing effect of an oppositional veto for its own electoral constituency. Given the very small number of government bills that actually fail because of a veto in the second chamber, we think it safe to assume that a government actually wants to get its bills through parliament most of the time.…”

Section: Legislative Self-restraint and Compromise Under Divided Govementioning

confidence: 99%

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Manow

Burkhart

2007

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Using the Vanberg (1998) model of legislative autolimitation from the judicial review literature, we investigated the impact of divided government on the strategic choices of government and opposition. The main prediction of the model is that a strong opposition dominance in the second chamber (Bundesrat) usually does not lead to open party-political conflict, but rather to a government's legislative selfrestraint. We tested the hypotheses following from the model on a detailed dataset comprising all legislative bills in Germany between 1976 and 2002. The results show that the main effects of divided government are, in fact, indirect and anticipatory. We conclude that when majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat diverge, the impact on legislation is substantial.

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Section: Legislative Self-restraint and Compromise Under Divided Govementioning

confidence: 99%

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Manow

Burkhart

2007

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…20 The unanimity requirement implies that the set of equilibrium outcomes is the (nonempty) subset of P (C 2 , g 1 ) containing all the levels of public spending which are Pareto optimal for the coalition members. With respect to the reform issue, the first-period decision will be reversed (i.e.…”

Section: Political Equilibriummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…where m is the ego rent it gets when C 2 = C. Thus party i agrees to join coalition C if and only if 20 Note that P (C 2 , g 1 ) is non-empty since either…”

Section: Government Formation Let V I Be the Number Of Votes Party Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Blame-Game Politics in a Coalition Government

Déllis

2004

SSRN Journal

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An important question in political economics concerns delays in the adoption of socially beneficial reforms. The present paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decisionmaking process, nor the policy preferences of the politicians. It shows that a governing party favoring a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption and blame its coalition partners for the non-adoption. This is referred to as blame-game politics. The rationale for playing such a game is to prevent some parties from acquiring a better reputation as supporters of the reform. At a more general level, the argument applies to situations where several agents, whose types are private information have each to take an action while the principal observes only the aggregate outcome.

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“…The agenda setter can include as few, or as many, private items in the bill as she wishes whereas our previous results indicated that there was generally a limited on the number of private goods the agenda setter would want to include. If the legislators' motives include embarrassing the executive by 'forcing' him to veto popular projects, as Burkhead (1956) and Groseclose and McCarty (2000) suggest, then the individual item override has potentially negative consequences for the executive. That is, adding an private good to a bill has no consequences for the legislators but forces the executive to make unpopular choices.…”

Section: Proposition 4 Under the Line-item With Individual Item Overrmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Models of veto bargaining don't address one of the concerns voiced by opponents of the item veto either-legislators' incentive to pass bills unacceptable to the president while claiming credit for their attempts to do so in their constituency. The presence of credit claiming incentives 8 explains the executive's use of the item (and the package) veto without assuming that legislators (e.g., Cameron 2000;Matthews 1989;McCarty 1997) or voters (e.g., Groseclose and McCarty 2000) are simply badly informed about the executive's preferences. Vetoes do occur in Magar's (2001) complete information model where the actors derive utility from taking a stand by proposing bills that will be vetoed or using vetoes that the legislature will override.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Executive veto power and credit claiming

Indriðason

2010

Public Choice

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The line-item veto has often be heralded as an effective tool in reducing pork barrel spending. A model of veto bargaining over public goods and pork barrel spending in the presence of credit claiming incentives demonstrates that the item veto does not necessarily reduce pork barrel spending and reduces the executive's ability to attain his preferred level of spending on public goods. The item veto also has an ambiguous effect on the balance of power between the executive and the legislature while strengthening the position of the legislative agenda setter within the legislature.

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The Politics of Blame: Bargaining before an Audience

Cited by 279 publications

References 14 publications

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Legislative Self‐Restraint Under Divided Government In Germany, 1976–2002

Blame-Game Politics in a Coalition Government

Executive veto power and credit claiming

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