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Though many of the world's legislatures are bicameral in nature, the ways in which they change legislation is not well understood. This chapter begins with a review of the expected effects of bicameralism, and discusses the state of the literature on how the House and Senate resolve their differences. The chapter also introduces data on conference committees and the use of amendment trading to resolve differences, with a special focus on important legislation and appropriations legislation. There is no doubt that the use of bicameral bargaining in Congress has declined, though the current literature has little explanation for the reasons behind this reduction.

This chapter describes the agenda setting powers of Chilean presidents and the positional constraints with which they have had to govern. The latter has been caused mainly by the lack of unified government and super-majority requirements for changes on several policy areas. Presidents initiate most laws and have a high rate of bill approval, which is consistent with the view that strong legislative powers can contribute to overcoming some positional constraints. The chapter finds that most major presidential bills passed include legislators’ amendments, and that presidents fight off unwanted changes with amendments of their own offered during the committee stage or via amendatory vetoes. With regard to plenary votes, it finds that majority control in the Chamber of Deputies has led to significant advantages for the governing coalition, while in a split Senate there have been no significant differences between the two coalitions. It also finds that conference committee proposals, always voted under closed rules, are highly successful.

The formal model characterizes conferees as having discretion to change legislation. Most importantly, conferees can make more dramatic changes to the bill when the winning coalitions in the chambers are unwilling to reject the bill because they receive low benefits from rejection, and when coalition size is large. If the winning coalitions within each chamber are small, even a minor change to the legislation by the conferees could result in a few members switching their vote and a loss in majority support. Likewise, failure at the post-passage resolution stage is characterized as a mistake in the use of discretion by the conferees. The results demonstrate that more moderate coalitions constrain conferee discretion as they are more willing to reject the bill.

Congress passed the first amendments to FOIA in 1974 over Nixon's objections during the height of the Watergate Scandal. Nixon's expansion in the use and scope of executive privilege not only brought about a Supreme Court decision but pushed Congress into amending FOIA. On the day Nixon resigned from office and Ford was sworn in as president, the FOIA amendment bill was sitting in a conference committee. The conference committee reached out to Ford his first week in office to inform him that a final version of the bill was done and would be passed immediately. Ford asked for time, opening what would become several months of negotiations between the White House and Congress over amending FOIA. Unable to sway Congress enough, Ford threatened to and then ultimately vetoed the amendment bill, which Congress overrode. The interactions between the executive and legislative branches during this bargaining period highlights key factors of understanding the issues of executive privilege and FOIA in the post-Nixon period.