Negotiating Political Agreements

Cathie Jo Martin

The recent gridlock in U.S. Congress may well be a metaphor for the erosion of cooperation in contemporary political life. We Americans often value cooperation at the community level, but our national public space is dominated by endless bickering and stalemate, and our national political institutions seem to betray our best intentions. Many other advanced, industrial democracies do a better job at locating pragmatic solutions to pressing policy problems through political negotiation, using the very norms of cooperation that we teach our children and often practice in our communities. These nations manage the tussles and traumas of politics with a level of grace, efficiency, and effectiveness that today seems absent from the American political process, and they avoid the extreme deadlock that often paralyzes contemporary American politics. The "high-noon" brinkmanship between our Democrats and Republicans is fundamentally at odds with the quieter mechanisms for policymaking in Northern Europe, and our politics of stalemate sharply contrasts with their politics of cooperation. One wonders, then, why America — one of the most economically and socially vibrant countries in the world — has become relatively impotent in the political realm.

This book explores the problems of political negotiation, by which we mean the pol itical practice in which individuals — usually acting in institutions on behalf of others — make and respond to claims, arguments, and proposals with the aim of reaching mutually acceptable binding agreements. We begin by considering the particular obstacles to political negotiation in the United States and the ways that Congress currently addresses these obstacles. Drawing from writings in experimental psychology, we identify forms of what we call negotiation myopia — that is, the mistakes made by the human brain in processing information and calculating collective political interests. We summarize how the institutions and procedural rules of collective political engagement help overcome negotiation myopia, and we highlight European and international examples of institutions that create dramatically different incentives for cooperation among political actors, interest groups, and citizens. We offer suggestions for how policymakers might overcome institutional constraints against negotiating agreement in politics.

In great part, the institutional obstacles to political negotiation in the United States are well known: a strong separation of powers between the presidency and Congress (with branches often controlled by different parties) and the structure of two-party competition (particularly when these parties are polarized and relatively equally matched) produce few incentives for political cooperation between the warring sides. By contrast, politicians in countries with multiple major parties must practice cross-party cooperation to gain and hold power, and the governments of those countries often have close linkages between the executive prime ministers and their legislative parliaments. Our two major parties in the United States have no such incentives. Win or lose is the name of the game, and constant conflict, changes in government, and frequent policy reversals make for an unstable policy and business climate.

U.S. institutions for organizing private interests do little to further successful political outcomes. For example, American firms are adept at demanding narrow regulatory concessions that pertain to their own industries, and Congress is bombarded with demands from every nook and cranny of the business community. Yet employers and unions have weak associations to help them meet collective political goals; consequently, they have difficulty expressing collective interests. They do not trust government, but they also cannot trust their collective selves.

It would be naive to think that all conflicts may be negotiated, and this is particularly true for the current American Congress (see chapters 2 and 3). Legislators may derive greater benefits from blocking deals than from making a good-faith effort for mutual accommodation. In their reluctance to negotiate a mutually acceptable compromise, they may be driven by their well-heeled funders, by electoral and partisan priorities, or by deep ideological divisions. Even political agreement does not ensure democratic or just solutions to policy problems: deals may benefit those at the negotiation table but may adversely affect those whose interests are not represented (for example, the future generations, the marginally employed, and the nonvoters). When reformers confront parties that prioritize electoral gain above substantive solutions to economic and social problems, and deep-seated ideological divisions result in stalemate and blindness to the fortunes of future generations, then political struggle rather than negotiation may well be the better recourse for altering the status quo.

Yet, despite the institutional odds against it, political negotiation sometimes works in the United States and elsewhere. This book analyzes how these episodes of success may occur. These unexpected successes in political negotiation often happen when participants adopt the rules of collective political engagement that routinely enable higher levels of cooperation in other advanced democracies. For example, procedural arrangements that incorporate a formal role for nonpartisan, technical expertise in policy deliberations in advance of specific legislative proposals may facilitate a collective "meeting of the minds." Repeated interactions among participants establish informal punishments for deception and bloated claims at the same time that those interactions nurture norms of trustworthy behavior. Dire consequences for inaction (or penalty defaults) help prevent stonewalling behavior. Allowing negotiations to take place in private settings encourages pondering rather than posturing.

We argue that adopting many of these rules of engagement may facilitate deliberative negotiation, in which participants search for fair compromises and often recognize the positive-sum possibilities that are otherwise frequently overwhelmed by zero-sum conflicts. Of course, deliberative negotiation is possible only in situations in which...