Committee proposals and restrictive rules.

Abstract

I analyze a game-theoretic model of committee-legislature interaction in which a majority decision to adopt either an open or closed amendment rule occurs following the committee's proposal of a bill. I find that, in equilibrium, the closed rule is almost always chosen when the dimension of the policy space is >1. Furthermore, the difference between the equilibrium outcome and that which would have occurred under the open rule can be arbitrarily small.