What is gridlock interval

Keith Krehbiel. Politicians and pundits alike have complained that the divided governments of the last decades have led to legislative gridlock.

Not so, argues Keith Krehbiel, who advances the provocative theory that divided government actually has little effect on legislative productivity. Gridlock is in fact the order of the day, occurring even when the same party controls the legislative and executive branches.

Meticulously researched and anchored to real politics, Krehbiel argues that the pivotal vote on a piece of legislation is not the one that gives a bill a simple majority, but the vote that allows its supporters to override a possible presidential veto or to put a halt to a filibuster.

This theory of pivots also explains why, when bills are passed, winning coalitions usually are bipartisan and supermajority sized. Offering an incisive account of when gridlock is overcome and showing that political parties are less important in legislative-executive politics than previously thought, Pivotal Politics remakes our understanding of American lawmaking. Filibuster Pivots. Presidential Power? By combining innovative yet accessible theorizing with rigorous empirical tests, Krehbiel has made a major contribution to the literatures on divided government, legislative-executive relations, and the policy process more generally.

Krehbiel begins with the observation that there is a shortage of good basic theories of U. Existing frameworks fail to account for two basic facts of lawmaking in America: Gridlock is common but not constant, and coalitions are regularly bipartisan and greater than simple majorities.

Krehbiel develops a simple formal model that yields predictions consistent with these basic facts and accounts for variations in gridlock level and coalition size. The model includes a president and n legislators in a unicameral legislature, each with an ideal point along a unidimensional policy space and single-peaked preferences. Earlier formal models of legislatures focused on the median voter as the pivotal decision maker, but Krehbiel incorporates two procedures that temper simple majority decision making: the president's right to veto legislation which is subject to a two-thirds override vote by the legislature and the right of unlimited debate in the Senate which generally can only be overcome with a three-fifths cloture vote.

The pivotal voter in veto override when the president is, for example, to the left of the median voter is the legislator whose ideal point and all Use this link to get back to this page. Author: Eric Schickler. Date: Mar. Publisher: Cambridge University Press.

Document Type: Book review. Length: 1, words.