Proposal rights, veto rights, and political bargaining

Formal models of political bargaining generally emphasize the importance of the allocation of prerogatives such as proposal and veto rights among the bargainers. However, despite the importance of these arguments for the study of political institutions, little work has been done to clarify precisely what general roles each of these prerogatives play in generating political outcomes. In this article, I develop a sequential-choice bargaining model that incorporates very general allocations of both proposal and veto rights. The model helps clarify the important strategic distinctions between these rights and identify the conditions under which they have substantial impacts on outcomes. My analysis demonstrates how these prerogatives interact and how the failure to account for this interaction can lead to mistaken inferences about their individual effects. Finally, the model suggests that the value of these rights is heavily influenced by a number of other features of the institutional bargaining environment.