Against Gridlock: The Viability of Interest-Based Legislative Negotiation
by GREGORY BRAZEAL
The wide cast of characters whose behavior shapes the creation of federal laws in the United States, from congressional leaders to committee chairs, from lobbyists to constituents, from the President to the media, can all be seen as engaged in a complex, multiparty negotiation. The negotiation has only two possible outcomes: a deal or no deal, the passage of a new bill into law or the maintenance of the legal status quo. This paper attempts to make the case for the viability of interest-based legislative negotiation strategies at the federal level.
What is interest-based, also sometimes called “principled,” negotiation? In a nutshell, it is a set of techniques that attempts to improve the quality and likelihood of negotiated agreement by providing an alternative to traditional “positional” bargaining techniques. The positional or hard-bargaining approach views negotiation on the model of haggling in a market. Each side adopts an extreme position, knowing that it will not be accepted, and then employs a combination of guile, bluffing, and brinksmanship in order to cede as little as possible before reaching a deal. Positional bargainers conceive of negotiation as a process of distributing a fixed amount of value.
