Veto Threat Bargaining with a Bicameral Congress

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920925917
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920925917

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(3) 628 –644

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920925917

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Article

“Bargaining ‘within the family,’ has a rather different

quality than bargaining with members of the rival clan”

—(Neustadt 1960, 187).

In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama

set the tone of his relations with the new Republican

Congress by threatening to veto five different Republican

initiatives. During the first ten weeks of the new ses-

sion, he followed this up with memoranda to Republican

House and Senate floor leaders threatening to veto sev-

enteen additional bills awaiting floor action. Although

prolific in his early use of veto threats, Obama’s reliance

on such threats was well precedented. Over the past

thirty years, presidents have routinely signaled Congress

their intention to veto pending legislation if it were not

modified to their liking. A good indicator of their efforts

can be found in Figure 1 in the volume of veto-threaten-

ing Statements of Administration Policy (SAPs) sent to

congressional leaders from their introduction in 1985

through 2016.

With modern presidents routinely issuing veto threats,

the question arises: do these signals matter? Do they

influence legislation? These questions take on special

poignancy with the sharp drop-off of vetoes and hence

opportunities for sequential veto bargaining (SVB;

Cameron 2000) over the past three decades.1 One of two

policy purposes may underwrite veto rhetoric—blocking

passage or persuading Congress to pass a different bill

closer to the president’s preferences.2 Over three-quarters

of the 844 authorization bills threatened in Figure 1 met

the first fate. In Washington’s present-day gridlock, this

failure rate is unsurprising. Of unthreatened bills that pass

the first chamber, 58 percent fail to reach enrollment.

Perhaps more surprising are the 186 threatened bills that

made it to the president’s desk and that he signed 133.

Eight more became law after Congress overrode a veto.

This article continues a familiar theme of recent

research on the prospects for successful governance in

this era of divided party control of Congress and the

presidency (Cameron 2000; Mayhew 1991). Each of the

enrolled bills in this study began inauspiciously with the

president threatening a veto. How did Washington’s

925917PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920925917Political Research QuarterlyGuenther and Kernell

research-article2020

1Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

2University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Scott M. Guenther, Princeton University, 1-S-7 Green Hall, Princeton,

NJ 08542, USA.

Email: scottmg@princeton.edu

Veto Threat Bargaining with a

Bicameral Congress

Scott M. Guenther1 and Samuel Kernell2

Abstract

According to the conventional view, presidents are largely bereft of influence with an opposition-controlled Congress.

Congress sends them legislation with a “take it or leave it” choice that maximizes the preferences of the opposition

majority while minimizing presidents’ preferences. To extricate themselves from this bind, presidents threaten vetoes.

Past research suggests that their efforts largely fail, however, for two model-driven reasons: first, veto threats amount

to minimally informative “cheap talk,” and second, Congress is a unitary actor with firm control over its agenda. We

relax both assumptions, bringing veto rhetoric into a setting more closely resembling real-world conditions. Presidents

transmit credible veto threats to a heterogeneous, bicameral Congress where chamber rules enable the minority

party to wield some influence over legislation. Examining the legislative histories of all veto-threatened bills passed

between 1985 and 2016, we confirm that veto threats ward off about half of veto-targeted legislative provisions—a far

greater share than for comparable unthreatened provisions. The House of Representatives is more likely to introduce

and pass legislation objectionable to presidents and the Senate is more likely to accommodate presidents, findings

consistent with the textbook description of the modern bicameral Congress.

Keywords

presidency, Congress, political parties, veto, bargaining

Guenther and Kernell 629

politicians manage to circumnavigate their sharp parti-

san differences and reach agreement? Did presidents

back down? Did Congress? Finding significant compro-

mises in the enrolled bills, we then investigate where in

congressional deliberations veto threats had an impact.

We begin in the next section by reviewing research

that cedes presidents little or no opportunity to influence

legislation. The prevailing model of veto threat politics,

we argue, imposes two overly restrictive conditions.

First, a unitary Congress exploits its agenda control to

present presidents with barely acceptable “take it or leave

it” choices. Second, presidents—unable to issue credible

veto threats—are relegated to enlisting heavily dis-

counted, minimally informative cheap talk.

In Section “Veto Threat Bargaining,” we develop a

model of veto threat bargaining (VTB) that relaxes both

restrictive assumptions. Congress is bicameral. Beyond

this, each chamber is institutionally complex, its mem-

berships diverse, and its business conducted by coordi-

nated party teams (Cox and McCubbins 2005). Not only

do presidents’ veto rhetoric signal their preferences to the

opposition majority, it offers focal coordination to their

copartisans, who are dispersed across the House, the

Senate and the executive branch. Far from a product of

negotiations between unitary, constitutional actors,

successful legislation arises from a sequence of exchanges

among partisans each of whom derives influence from

their executive or legislative office. The model generates

five hypotheses (Section “Hypotheses”) testing whether

veto threats alter legislation and, when they do, if they

track the bicameral differences in the prerogatives allo-

cated to the president’s copartisans. Section “Data and

Methods” introduces SAP as presidents’ preferred means

for transmitting credible veto threats to Congress. In

Section “Findings,” we test the impact of SAP-based veto

threats on the legislative histories of all 186 threatened,

eventually enrolled bills. Credible veto threats, we con-

clude, can be broadly effective in coordinating the presi-

dent’s copartisans and establishing a bargaining position

with the opposition majority.

Veto Threats: Anemic Instruments

of Influence?

The standard separation-of-powers model has a unitary

Congress exploit its agenda setting authority to present

presidents with an ultimatum choice. Two common vari-

ants of this model differ sharply in the assumed quality

of the information available to legislators about the

president’s preferences. Yet, their equilibrium outcomes

Figure 1. Veto threats of authorization bills by congress.

There were no recorded veto threats in the 103rd Congress (1993–1994).