The Congressional Leadership Dilemma

Abstract

Previous theories assume that congressional party leaders internalize the welfare of the parties they lead. Accordingly, existing work deemphasizes the role of agency problems in explaining the conditions under which parties grant more political resources to their leaders. To show how agency problems can still arise even when the party leader wants only to maximize collective goods and stay in office, I offer a model that borrows two ideas from models of political accountability: leaders vary in quality and giving the leader more resources makes it more difficult to remove her. The model implies that the party faces a tradeoff between maximizing the leader’s capacity to produce collective goods and preserving its ability to remove low-quality leaders from office. This theory offers novel predictions, integrates existing results as implications of a single theory, and explains why the leader’s resources sometimes change even as the political context remains the same (JEL D72: Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior).