Legislating from both sides of the aisle: Information and the value of bipartisan consensus

This paper motivates bipartisanship through a formal model in which committ ee members are assumed to possess policy expertise. Its central findings ar e: 1) bipartisan support for legislation is more informative than partisan support; 2) bipartisanship is preferred when the uncertainty surrounding ou tcomes is large and partisan policy differences are small; 3) "minority par ty gatekeeping" is possible when minority party members refuse to endorse m ajority party proposals; and 4) legislators with extreme preferences need m inority party support to pass legislation. An equilibrium selection criteri on is also introduced and applied to the model to predict under what condit ions the majority party will seek bipartisan support.