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Setting the Agenda

This article builds on an earlier model of intra-caucus Congressional bargaining.

In short, it's a normal form game with “Leadership” trying to pass a bill and a “Faction” trying to extract concessions. The members in the faction are not fixed and can change with the particulars of each bill. It describes a scenario where the majority has a slim margin over the minority, consistent with the last couple Congresses.1

It assumes the given bill being negotiated is exogenous. You can apply the particulars of the bill to predict thresholds and bargaining dynamics, but it leaves unexplored how leadership selects what bill to move, or more accurately how to move it.

So here we empirically test the shape of the agenda-setting through what vehicles get negotiated over. Not by subject, but through choice of floor consideration mechanism: open rule, closed rule, or suspension.

The intuition is the following:

• Much of the literature describes Congressional leadership’s influence showing up through setting the agenda: deciding what makes it to the floor or not. For example Cox and McCubbins (Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives, 2005) argues the majority party’s core power is gating what reaches the floor, with choice of rule as the mechanism.

• If there’s a slim-majority bargain to be had, it first gets leveraged in the form of a “rule” applying to the legislation. Leadership needs sufficient support for the rule structure if it is to move to final consideration. But that choice is endogenous.

Below I offer some hypotheses and test them using data from recent Congresses.

Stand Up and Be Counted

We can make some conclusions about the Leadership’s objective function by looking at closed-rules behavior. The three hypotheses and the mixed test results:

❌ H1: As majority margin ⬇️, likelihood of a suspension ⬆️

✅ H2: As majority margin ⬇️, likelihood of a closed rule ⬆️

🟡 H3: Leadership-backed rules fail consistently across margin size

Hypothesis 1

Suspension is a mechanism that routes around a rule vote, at the price of needing two-thirds and therefore minority votes. So if a shrinking margin makes the rule vote riskier, one adaptation is to go around it.

Ultimately, suspensions carry 70–85 percent of House-passed measures. The bills where holdouts actually have leverage are too few to move that share, so we can’t reject the null result that the share of suspension votes don’t follow the size of majority margin.

Claim: Share of Suspension Votes Goes Up as Margins Get Tighter

Verdict: Rejection

Hypothesis 2

Essentially the default for rules should be a “closed rule” which puts forward a floor vote with no option for amending — take it or leave it. It limits an avenue of leverage for holdouts to threaten passage. However limiting or eliminating amendments also removes an avenue to negotiate for support. So there’s a tradeoff.

Claim: Likelihood of a Closed Rule Increases as Margins Get Slimmer

Verdict: Strong Support

Hypothesis 3

While rare, leadership can and does lose some rule votes but obviously wants to minimize that outcome ceteris paribus. Contested rule votes are a necessary option, and as a first-order effect the failure rate should increase as margins decrease and holdout leverage increases.

However there’s a compensating behavior. The number and scope of the agenda is not fixed, so the effective cost to leadership is the same across different margins. And therefore altogether (so this claim goes) they should lose rule votes at a consistent rate.

Claim: Leaderships Lose Rule Votes at the Same Rate

Verdict: Weak Support

Technically we can’t reject the null hypothesis. As you can see the standard errors are quite large. If we exclude the Pelosi portion of the sample we get a tighter confidence interval and a confident verdict that the hypothesis holds.

Note: From 2011-2022 rule votes were adopted 100 percent of the time (n = 519), so this is clearly a slim-majority phenomenon.

DATA SOURCES:

• Ballotpedia, “Vacancies in the United States Congress” (117th and 118th Congress)

• Jeffrey Lewis, et al., Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. https://voteview.com/ (2026)

• Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, “Vacancies.”

• House Rules Committee Democratic Staff, "How Donald Trump Stole Congress" (Staff Report, Part I), Dec. 29, 2025 (“McGovern Report”)

• Don Wolfensberger, "A Farewell to Open Rules," Dreier Roundtable (Claremont McKenna College), Feb. 12, 2026.

• GPO, BILLSTATUS bulk data, 117th–119th Congresses (accessed Sept. 21, 2026)

• CRS, Suspension of the Rules: House Practice in the 118th Congress, R48650 (Aug. 27, 2025)

The author is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at

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