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Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures: When and Why Does Malapportionment Matter?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2003

STEPHEN ANSOLABEHERE ,
JAMES M. SNYDER  and
MICHAEL M. TING
STEPHEN ANSOLABEHERE
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 ([email protected]).
JAMES M. SNYDER
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Political Science and Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Address: 30 Wadsworth Avenue, Room 470, Cambridge, MA 02142 ([email protected]).
MICHAEL M. TING
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, International Affairs Bldg., Floor 7, 420 West 118th St., New York, NY 10027 ([email protected]).
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Abstract

Malapportionment of seats in bicameral legislatures, it is widely argued, confers disproportionate benefits to overrepresented jurisdictions. Ample empirical research has documented that unequal representation produces unequal distribution of government expenditures in bicameral legislatures. The theoretical foundations for this empirical pattern are weak. It is commonly asserted that this stems from unequal voting power per se. Using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the closed-rule, infinite-horizon model of Baron and Ferejohn (1989), we assess the conditions under which unequal representation in a bicameral legislature may lead to unequal division of public expenditures. Two sets of results are derived. First, when bills originate in the House and the Senate considers the bill under a closed rule, the equilibrium expected payoffs of all House members are, surprisingly, equal. Second, we show that small-state biases can emerge when (1) there are supermajority rules in the malapportioned chamber, (2) the Senate initiates bills, which produces maldistributed proposal probabilities, and (3) the distributive goods are “lumpy.”We thank seminar participants at New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association for helpful comments. James Snyder and Michael Ting gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Science Foundation Grant SES-0079035. Stephen Ansolabehere gratefully acknowledges the support of the Carnegie Corporation under the Carnegie Scholars program. This paper was written while Michael Ting was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he thanks the Department of Political Science there for their support.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , August 2003 , pp. 471 - 481
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

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