Agenda Control Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Agenda control may be defined as the ability to affect the way in which alternatives enter collective decision making. While agenda control is important generally, it plays a special role in the rational-choice-based theory of democratic institutions (or the “new institutionalism”). It has two major but somewhat different roles. One is the ability to regulate what alternatives are allowed to be considered at all; the other is in controlling the manner in which alternatives are considered, such as the order of voting.

Path Dependence In The Absence Of Majority-Rule Voting Equilibrium

A distinction may be drawn between when there is a majority rule voting equilibrium—roughly speaking, an outcome that a majority in society prefers to all others—and when there is no such an equilibrium. The first case is the famous median voter result and its variants. The second case is when there is a majority cycle with no alternative that can win a majority over all others.

In the latter case, what wins depends on the order in which alternatives come up, as Charles R. Plott (1967) showed, and hence agenda control is exceedingly important. Richard McKelvey (1976) and Norman Schofield (1983) then demonstrated that there is a path of choices that makes it possible to get from any possible starting point to any logically possible policy imaginable; hence, the outcome is called path dependent. This massive extent of potential effects put agenda control at the center of inquiry for new institutionalist theories, for whoever controlled the agenda controlled the outcome, getting almost literally any outcome the controllers desired.

Plott’s work also shows how agenda control of this form can matter. Plott, Cohen, and Levine (1978) were asked to devise a method for choosing among planes for a club for those who enjoy flying airplanes. Plott and Levine devised an agenda that secured Levine’s most preferred outcome, even though a majority preferred something else. Plott, Cohen, and Levine (1978) then devised a series of game theoretic experiments to show this point in another way. By clever application of agenda control, they could induce the subjects in the experiment to choose any kind of pizza toppings the Plott and company desired, including “chocolate pizza” (which they used in the title of their article).

Majority-Rule Equilibria Versus Reversion Points

The most important positive result about majority rule is that it will select the ideal point of the median voter, because that it is the majority-rule equilibrium when a median exists. In Duncan Black’s median voter theorem (1958), the agenda is assumed to be open, the median voter can therefore propose a preferred outcome at some point, and that alternative then will defeat any and every other proposal. Thomas Romer and Howard Rosenthal (1978) examined the case when an individual (or group) can select which alternatives may to be considered. They find that, at the extreme, agenda control power will pull the outcome away, sometimes substantially, from the median voter outcome.

For example, in many locales, the school board may propose a tax rate to pay for schools for the coming year. Voters then vote it up or down. Given this ability to limit the choice set of the voters drastically, it is not surprising that the agenda controller can shape the outcome. It is not complete control, however, as in the case where there is no majority rule equilibrium. The final result reflects, in effect, a balancing between the preferences of the median voter, the preferences of the agenda controller, and what is called the reversion point— what would happen if the proposal of the agenda controller is defeated. The reversion point is not always the status quo. To use the school board example, if the school board’s new tax rate is rejected, the school budget may not revert to last year’s budget—it may fall to zero. The prospect of essentially shutting down the schools would give the school board tremendous bargaining power as the agenda controller to obtain an outcome it desires. In general, the more extreme the reversion point, the greater the control held by the agenda controller.

Wide Applications

This relatively straightforward result has been applied in many settings. For example, committees in the U.S. Congress have “gatekeeping power” in their jurisdiction. That is, they have a set of policies that are granted to them, their policy jurisdiction. In many circumstances, they decide whether there will be any consideration of change to the status quo in their jurisdiction at all. By “keeping the gates closed”—that is, reporting out no proposal for new policy in that area—the Congress as a whole cannot change policy. (In reality, there are of course limits to this power.) Conversely, they can “open the gates” by reporting a bill out from committee to the floor. In some cases, the bill has a “closed” rule, which means that no amendments are permitted. Thus, in such cases, the committee has strong agenda control in the sense analyzed by Romer and Rosenthal. Shepsle (1979) developed a model of Congress along these lines.

Furthermore, when the two chambers in the U.S. Congress pass different forms of similar legislation, the bills are often referred to a conference committee to work out the differences. The bill designed by the conference committee then returns to the floor of both chambers for final consideration with no amendments permitted, another instance of such agenda control. In many parliaments, the government (that is, the party or parties that form the operative majority and appoint a cabinet of ministers) often reports bills from the cabinet to the legislature with no amendments permitted. Thus, this form of agenda control has many important applications to democratic institutions around the world.

Bibliography:

Black, Duncan. The Theory of Committees and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
McKelvey, Richard D. “Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control.” Journal of Economic Theory 12 (1976): 472–482.
McKelvey, Richard D., Peter C. Ordeshook, and Peter Ungar. “Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Voting Equilibria in Continuous Voter Distributions.” SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics 39 (1980): 161–168.
Mckelvey, Richard D., and Norman Scofield. “Structural Instability of the Core.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 15 (1986): 179–198.
Plott, Charles R. “A Notion of Equilibrium and Its Possibility under Majority Rule.” American Economic Review 57 (September 1967): 787–806.
“Path Independence, Rationality, and Social Choice.” Econometrica 41 (November 1973): 1075–1091.
Plott, Charles R., Linda Cohen, and Michael Levine. “Communication and Agenda Influence:The Chocolate Pizza Design.” In Coalition Forming Behavior: Contributions to Experimental Economics, vol. 8, edited by H. Sauermann, 329–357.Tubingen, Germany: Mohr, 1978.
Plott, Charles R., and Michael Levine. “A Model of Agenda Influence on Committee Decisions.” American Economic Review 68 (March 1978): 146–160.
Romer,Thomas, and Howard Rosenthal. “Political Resource Allocation, Controlled Agendas, and the Status Quo.” Public Choice 33 (Winter 1978): 27–43.
Schofield, Norman. “Generic Instability of Majority Rule.” Review of Economic Studies 50 (1983): 695–705.
Shepsle, Kenneth A. “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models.” American Journal of Political Science 23, (February 1979): 27–59.