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Limited Foresight and Gridlock in Bargaining

Parth Parihar

Quarterly Journal of Political Science2025https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00022032article
AJG 3ABDC B
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

This paper contributes to the study of gridlock by analyzing a model of repeated two-party bargaining in which status quo agreements and proposal power are in general both endogenous. I introduce a key object, the foresight horizon, to index the number of downstream agreements agents incorporate into their decision-making on current policy. Gridlock occurs in equilibrium if and only if foresight is limited. I relate equilibrium behavior within the specific setting of legislative bargaining to observed phenomena in public policy-making. While there is short-run correlation of future policy with the status quo, policy converges in the long-run of equilibrium play to an invariant distribution, independent of where it begins. I also demonstrate that policy polarization — the gap between parties’ actionable proposals — is increasing in their foresight.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00022032

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@article{parth2025,
  title        = {{Limited Foresight and Gridlock in Bargaining}},
  author       = {Parth Parihar},
  journal      = {Quarterly Journal of Political Science},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00022032},
}

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Limited Foresight and Gridlock in Bargaining

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.