Bicameral Negotiations: The Navette System in France

Abstract

This article investigates the decision-making process in the French bicameral legislature: the navette system. In this system, the legislation shuttles between the two houses until agreement is reached or until a stopping rule is applied. We examine the interaction between upper and lower houses as a bargaining game with complete and one-sided incomplete information.The complete information model permits us to evaluate the political implications of the navette's various institutional features (where the bill is first introduced, number of iterations, final veto power, etc.). The incomplete information approach permits us to predict the duration of the navette process. Data from the French Fifth Republic in the 1959–86 period corroborate the conclusions of the model. Because the navette system is the most commonly used method of decision making in bicameral legislatures, the model can be usefully generalized to other countries.