The Quality of Bipartisan Legislation

ABSTRACT Do good (i.e., welfare‐improving) policies receive bipartisan support? I develop a formal model where the quality of bipartisan legislation is conditional on voter perceptions of party competence. If voters infer that bills with bipartisan support are good bills and reelect the majority party for passing such legislation, then minority parties may have an incentive to oppose good bills to make the majority look bad. However, if voters believe only an incompetent minority party opposes the majority party's bills regardless of quality, then a strategic minority may support even bad bills. The minority party supports good bills and opposes bad bills only when the majority party has a large reputation advantage (i.e., when the majority party is more popular with voters). In an extension, I show that the majority may purposefully introduce bad bills. We can infer little about the quality of bipartisan legislation without considering party reputation concerns.