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 stud y 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 thes e rights and identify the conditions under which they have substantial impa cts on outcomes. My analysis demonstrates how these prerogatives interact a nd how the failure to account for this interaction can lead to mistaken inf erences about their individual effects. Finally, the model suggests that th e value of these rights is heavily influenced by a number of other features of the institutional bargaining environment.