Lobbying and Incentives for Legislative Organizations

Formal theories of the internal organization of legislature have mainly focused on the United States Congress. While these models have been successful in showing why committee systems should emerge in Congress, they fail to explain the variance in internal organization across legislatures which is indicated by the comparative study of legislative politics. To analyze the effects of different constitutional features on the organizational choices of legislatures, we adopt a vote-bying model (Groseclose and Snyder 1996) and then consider the incentives to delegate decision rights in a multi-chamber noncooperative game. Our analysis shows how multi-cameral legislatures can encourage the existence of internal veto players or super-majority rules, while unicameral bodies can provide incentives to delegate power to a single actor such as a prime minister or party leader.