The legislative calendar

In this paper, we model a legislative calendar as an ordered list of issues to be considered in sequence. We present two equilibrium models of legislative scheduling, one presuming that the calendar is itself the object of collective choice, and the other considering which calendars are immune from “discharge” (the change of at most one element of the calendar by a decisive coalition in the legislature). We then examine the question of designing a scheduling process consistent with a preexisting decisive structure. We show that, so long as the status quo policy is Pareto efficient, then for any legislative calendar there exists a nontrivial scheduling process under which the calendar in question is stable. The results have implications for the robustness of structure induced equilibria in general and the design of intralegislative “gatekeepers” (such as the Rules Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives) in particular.