Cover Bills

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

Legislators sometimes vote on bills that fail but, in the process, allow lawmakers to take an extreme position before ultimately voting to compromise. These proposals are commonly known as cover bills. Through two survey experiments featured in a newly published paper in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Assistant Professor and Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) Faculty Affiliate Christian Fong and PhD candidate Nicolas Florez (both of the University of Michigan) show that primary voters are more supportive of a compromiser if that legislator first votes for a cover bill. Through a causal mediation analysis, the authors show that cover bills are effective not because they prove that the compromise was the best deal the legislators could get, but because they demonstrate that the legislator shares the voter’s ideological commitments. They reduce the punishment associated with compromising even if respondents find out about the cover bill from legislators who opposed the compromise.

To learn more, read the full report here, as well as a video presentation below.

Photo from Christian Fong