Government Agenda-Setting and Bicameral Conflict Resolution

We examine the extent to which governments consider the role of bicameral conflict resolution procedures in legislative agenda-setting. We argue that governments may use these institutions to promote policy change in the event of bicameral conflict, especially when facing uncertainty over bicameral policy preferences. We test our arguments using comprehensive original data on forty years of German legislation and find that bicameral conflict resolution committees play a more sophisticated role in governmental policy making than previously suspected.