Executive Power and the Internal Organization of Legislatures

We present a model of endogenous legislative organization in a presidential democracy. We study how the policy preferences and the strength of the veto rights of the president shape the allocation of proposal power in the legislature. Contrary to the common intuition that stronger presidents weaken legislative parties, we find that the opposite is often true: stronger presidents generally increase the centralization of proposal rights in the opposition and have a non-monotonic effect on the strength of the legislative leadership of the president’s party.