Electoral and institutional structures can impede or facilitate bipartisan coalition building to pass legislation. Studying the Congress together with the state legislatures provides considerable institutional and electoral variability to model and test novel hypotheses about the circumstances when such negotiated settlements are most likely to occur. My hypotheses are, in part, derived from case studies of negotiation in state legislatures (a completed project funded by Hewlett in which I participated). My own project is based on a completed national survey of legislators. I am requesting funds to finish collecting and coding matching hard data on the legislators and their chambers.