BIO

AJ Schofield is a freshman at Florida State University. He is originally from West Palm Beach, Florida. AJ is majoring in finance on the pre-law track. In terms of career paths, he is narrowing them down to either in the field of finance or law. For his interests, he loves the piano, as he's been training classically since the age of 5. Additionally, he loves dogs, as he has trained them on behalf of animal shelters and has owned several his entire life.

Bipartisan Negotiations in Congress

Abstract

Bipartisan negotiations in Congress have received mixed validation due to their nature of having underlying motives and inconsistent resolutions. In collaboration with Professor Andy Ballard, and various other students and professors, student researchers have received a plentiful list of bipartisan negotiations since the 1980s. For each negotiation, students researched which party wanted which reforms, the reasons for this requested change, and which party received more of what they wanted overall. Utilizing this data allows us to analyze trends over time and predict future outcomes with improved accuracy. These conclusions range from identifying that the majority party usually gets more of what they want, or that under a more divided government, the party majority doesn’t have a remarkable effect. The analysis of these negotiations goes beyond merely cataloging events; it provides a lens through which researchers can scrutinize evolving trends over time. By identifying patterns in the give-and-take of political bargaining, researchers seek to derive conclusions that offer insights into the broader landscape of bipartisan cooperation within legislative processes. The students used a combination of scholarly web sources, the FSU library, and various websites containing information on previous Congress summaries and transcripts. All participants observed the same cases, with the goals of ruling out any discrepancies between our research, discovering trends over time depending on the state of government divide, and to what extent these differences are recognized in the real world. Ultimately, providing a safety net of peer-reviewed information allows our data to be transferred and considered more seriously.

Keywords: Congress, Negotiations, Bipartisan, Government, Policy