Legislative Cooperation among Impatient Legislators

Sufficient conditions for legislative cooperation are identified within the context of a model of repeated legislative interaction. We show that in many environments, cooperation is sustainable even among impatient legislators. Special attention is given to the case of repeated spatial bargaining; we find that when the dimensionality of the policy space is sufficiently large, parameterizations of the model which do not admit cooperation are rare and atypical. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, we demonstrate that legislative cooperation is possible in a one-dimensional policy space. The developed theory is applied to address various claims in the substantive literature on legislative parties.