Filibusted? The mixed effects of “going nuclear”

Abstract

Perennial gridlock in Washington has led to many political and media elites calling for an end to the filibuster. But would it matter? In this paper, we derive a series of legislative bargaining models and show that eliminating the filibuster would likely affect gridlock in a narrow set of circumstances. Using data on gridlock from Binder (2015), we conduct simulations to examine the effect of removing the filibuster on outcomes. The results demonstrate that, while some believe that getting the rid of the filibuster is a panacea, the practical effects of doing are more muted.

Keywords

U.S. senate,filibuster,pivotal politics,gridlock

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