The Power of the Last Word in Legislative Policy Making

  1. B. Douglas Bernheim1,
  2. Antonio Rangel2,
  3. Luis Rayo3,†

Article first published online: 7 SEP 2006

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00701.x

Issue

Econometrica

Econometrica

Volume 74, Issue 5, pages 1161–1190, September 2006

Additional Information

How to Cite

Bernheim, B. D., Rangel, A. and Rayo, L. (2006), The Power of the Last Word in Legislative Policy Making. Econometrica, 74: 1161–1190. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00701.x

Author Information

  1. 1

    Dept. of Economics, Stanford University, 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, U.S.A.; and NBER; bernheim@stanford.edu

  2. 2

    Dept. of Economics, Stanford University, 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, U.S.A.; and NBER; rangel@stanford.edu

  3. 3

    Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 5807 South Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.; lrayo@gsb.uchicago.edu.

  1. †

    We would like to thank three anonymous referees, Alberto Alesina, James Alt, David Baron, Jonathan Bendor, Ted Bergstrom, Kim Border, Alessandra Casella, Stephen Coate, Dhammika Dharmapala, Avinash Dixit, David Epstein, James Fearon, Ted Frach, Rod Garrat, Timothy Groseclose, Gene Grossman, Jonathan Gruber, Matthew Jackson, Jonathan Katz, Eric Maskin, Richard McKelvey, Antonio Merlo, Tom Palfrey, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Debraj Ray, Thomas Romer, Ken Shepsle, Kent Smetters, Barry Weingast, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Caltech, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, NBER, NYU, Princeton, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, UCLA, UCSB, and University of Pennsylvania. Antonio Rangel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the NSF (SES-0134618), and thanks the Hoover Institution for providing both financial support and a stimulating research environment. Doug Bernheim gratefully acknowledges financial support from the NSF (SES-0137129).

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 7 SEP 2006
  2. Article first published online: 7 SEP 2006
  3. Manuscript received March, 2002; final revision received February, 2006.

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Keywords:

  • Agenda setting;
  • legislative bargaining;
  • majority rule;
  • dictator;
  • pork barrel politics;
  • distributive politics

We examine legislative policy making in institutions with two empirically relevant features: agenda setting occurs in real time and the default policy evolves. We demonstrate that these institutions select Condorcet winners when they exist, provided a sufficient number of individuals have opportunities to make proposals. In policy spaces with either pork barrel or pure redistributional politics (where a Condorcet winner does not exist), the last proposer is effectively a dictator or near-dictator under relatively weak conditions.

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