Partisan and bipartisan signaling in congress

Gilligan and Krehbiel (1989) analyze bipartisanship in committees through a model in which committee ideal points are exactly symmetric about the floor's ideal point. This article has three objectives: it shows that the Gilligan and Krehbiel equilibrium does not generalize to asymmetric committee members; it proves that a similar equilibrium can be supported when the majority party committee member has gatekeeping power; and it compares this equilibrium to the one-signaler case to show that when partisan differences over policy are small, or when the uncertainty associated with a policy area is large, bipartsianship will be preferred to partisan policy making.