Contribution
The most significant contribution of the work published by Krehbiel (1998) is associated with the attempt to explain the US lawmaking process. As a scholar, Krehbiel provides important grounds for claiming that a pivotal politics theory might enhance contemporary lawmaking procedures. Consisting of two key elements, such as gridlock and coalition, the theory aims to explain how all lawmakers can be placed in a unidimensional policy space, and it suggests that divided government cannot provide the most appropriate solutions. Krehbiel (1998) presents his model in a quite detailed manner, emphasizing pivotal players such as Congress, the Senate, the President, and the veto override pivot. The author specifies all the movements and actions of each pivot and clarifies potential outcomes.
The implications of Krehbiel’s work lie in a description of adequate processes for presenting, revising, and approving laws. In particular, due to the fact that gridlock involves all the status quo points, the theory presupposes moderate policy proposals that will come to a standstill because of gridlock. In this regard, it is evident that the election of presidents is largely dependent on the preferences of the electorate, and some policies that were subject to gridlock may be eliminated and changed (Gray & Jenkins, 2017). At the same time, the author opposes party-centered and social choice theories since he addresses various essential factors such as ideological, institutional, and electoral aspects. The model offered by Krehbiel (1998) integrates status quo policies, heterogeneous preferences, and supermajority procedures, thus creating a comprehensive foundation for model building. The pivotal politics model also implies that actual policy changes will remain incremental. Thus the great contribution made by this author in political discourse is a new perspective on the lawmaking process that ensures adequate policy selection and respects its developing nature.
Criticism and Alternative Solution
This criticism addresses the core of Krehbiel’s model, as it focuses on key implications of the theory of pivotal politics. A consideration of the explanations offered by Krehbiel (1998) makes it possible to reach credible judgments about the role of this theory in US lawmaking procedures. It must be emphasized that Krehbiel’s theory serves as a preliminary point for model design, as it presents the basics of political organization. Since the above assumptions were made based on the existing evidence, their critical nature cannot be overestimated. In other words, the contribution of this author is likely to be associated with a thorough and anticipatory explanation of lawmaking in the US, including its key players, circumstances, and outcomes.
Comparing the pivotal politics theory with its alternatives, Gray and Jenkins (2017) find that retesting the theory revealed that the utilization of an explicitly ideological independent variable in the analysis of two landmark laws led to negative correlations between the severity of gridlock and law production per se. In this regard, a model of partisan positive agenda control may be assumed as an alternative for making sense of the realities of the lawmaking process in the US (Gray & Jenkins, 2017). This model implies that majority parties use closed rules in order to prevent the floor median from proposing amendments. Therefore the size of the blackout interval tends to be smaller, thus precluding the above situation. The significance of the alternative model lies in the fact that it controls for lawmakers’ incentives to differentiate themselves from the party they represent, as it focuses on conditional party government. It also promotes conceptual alignment between Congress and electoral parties in the framework of positive agenda control.
References
Gray, T. R., & Jenkins, J. A. (2017). Pivotal politics and the ideological content of Landmark Laws. Journal of Public Policy, 1, 1-28. Web.
Krehbiel, K. (1998). Pivotal politics: A theory of US lawmaking. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.