A War of Words: Explaining the Duration of the Filibuster in the U.S. Senate, 1919-1993
40 Pages Posted: 14 Oct 2007
Date Written: April 15, 2006
Abstract
In recent decades, the use of the filibuster has exploded, leading to charges that it is being used increasingly for trivial purposes. In this paper we investigate whether the use of the filibuster has changed over time, and in particular whether changes making it easier to achieve cloture have increased or decreased the extent to which filibusters are informative about the intensity of those involved. Inferences about duration as a measure of intensity are derived from a game theoretic model of the war of attrition. One advantage of this model is that it can be used to derive explicit functional forms for the statistical work. The results suggest that the filibuster is, if anything, even more informative today than in the past. We also find that the very elements of the filibuster that journalists and others have found so alarming are signs not of the weakness of cloture reform, but its strength. The results thus expand our understanding of the strategic interactions that take place between majorities and minorities.
Keywords: Filibuter, Senate, Cloture, Positive Political Theory, Congress, Game Theory, Empirical Testing
JEL Classification: H1
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Analyzing Incomplete Political Science Data: An Alternative Algorithm for Multiple Imputation
By Gary King, James Honaker, ...
-
A Unified Model of Cabinet Dissolution in Parliamentary Democracies
By Gary King, James E. Alt, ...
-
Not Asked and Not Answered: Multiple Imputation for Multiple Surveys
By Andrew Gelman, Gary King, ...
-
The Level of Democracy During Interregnum Periods: Recoding the polity2 Score
By Thomas Pluemper and Eric Neumayer
-
By Taeku Lee and Mark Schlesinger
-
Assessing the Impact of Internet Telephony on the Deployment of Telecommunications Infrastructure
-
By Jonathan N. Katz and Gabriel Katz
-
By Kathryn Pearson and Eric Mcghee
-
Associationism and Electoral Participation: A Multilevel Study of 2000 Spanish General Election
By Clara Riba and Anna Cuxart