Bargaining in legislature: number of parties and ideological polarization

There is a common perception in the political economy literature that a larger number of parties makes it more difficult and more expensive - in terms of pork barrel programs - to implement policy-changes in a legislature. This paper proves that this perception is not necessarily true. The driving i...

Full description

Autores:
Nupia Martínez, Oskar Andrés
Tipo de recurso:
Work document
Fecha de publicación:
2007
Institución:
Universidad de los Andes
Repositorio:
Séneca: repositorio Uniandes
Idioma:
eng
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.uniandes.edu.co:1992/8117
Acceso en línea:
http://hdl.handle.net/1992/8117
Palabra clave:
Number of parties
Bargaining
Legislature
Partidos políticos - Negociación
Pluralismo político - Modelos matemáticos
Poder legislativo
D72, D78
Rights
openAccess
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Description
Summary:There is a common perception in the political economy literature that a larger number of parties makes it more difficult and more expensive - in terms of pork barrel programs - to implement policy-changes in a legislature. This paper proves that this perception is not necessarily true. The driving idea behind this result is that the number of parties should matter for legislative outcomes only to the extent that the ideological polarization between them is high. The model developed in this paper shows that it can be cheaper - in terms of pork barrel programs-, and also more likely, for a government party to negotiate its preferred public policy with several parties that are less polarized than with a few parties that are strongly polarized.