Inter-Branch Bargaining over Policies with Multiple Outcomes
Whereas presidents serve the nation as a whole, members of Congress serve districts and states. As a consequence, presidents and members of Congress often disagree not only about the merits of different policy alternatives, but also about the criteria used to assess these alternatives. To investigate the relevance of these jurisdictional—and by extension criterial—differences for policymaking, we revisit a set of classic models of bargaining under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than define uncertainty about the mapping of a single policy into a single outcome, as all previous scholars have done, we allow for policies to generate two politically relevant outcomes, one local and another national. We then identify equilibria in which policy outcomes more closely approximate presidential preferences when a representative legislator (who cares about both outcomes) assigns greater value to national outcomes (over which a president's utility is uniquely defined). Among the many plausible applications of this theory, we analyze budgetary politics in war and peace. Consonant with our theory, we find that during periods of war, when elected officials are expected to privilege national outcomes, members of Congress pass appropriations that more closely reflect presidential proposals. This effect does not appear to be an artifact of either strategic proposal-making or any single measurement strategy or model specification.
