Effort, Intensity and Position Taking

Reconsidering Obstruction in the Pre-Cloture Senate

Bibliographic Data

ID6299883
AuthorsKathleen Bawn (0000-0001-7479-4921, Department of Political Science, UCLA, Box 951472, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472, kbawn@ polisci.ucla.edu), Gregory Koger (0000-0003-4378-1823, University of Miami)
Year2008
Volume20
Issue1
Pages67-92
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Theoretical Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0951-6298 • E-ISSN: 1460-3667
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0951629807084040
OpenAlexW2027896425
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited30

Effort is a crucial element of the legislative process — writing bills, forming coalitions, crafting strategies, and debating. We develop a model in which legislative decisions are the product of competitive effort by two teams, one trying to pass new legislation, and the other to block it. Teams choose effort levels based on preferences over the policy outcome, political rewards for effort, and opportunity costs, and the team that produces more effort wins. We apply this model to four cases of major legislation from the pre-cloture Senate: passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Ship Purchase Act of 1915, the Ship Arming bill of 1917, and the adoption of the Senate cloture rule in 1917. These cases demonstrate the value of looking beyond legislative voting and the rules that structure it, and of including effort as a key element of the legislative game

Business · Economics · Element (criminal law · Law and economics · Legislation · Legislative process · Legislature · Microeconomics · Outcome (game theory · Political science · Politics · Position (finance · Process (computing · Product (mathematics · Value (mathematics · Variety (cybernetics · Voting · Computer Science · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Game Theory and Voting Systems · Law · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems · Finance

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