The Role of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting

Bjorn Erik Rasch, George Tsebelis, Bjorn Erik Rasch, George Tsebelis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136870453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Setting the agenda for parliament is the most significant institutional weapon for governments to shape policy outcomes, because governments with significant agenda setting powers, like France or the UK, are able to produce the outcomes they prefer, while governments that lack agenda setting powers, such as the Netherlands and Italy in the beginning of the period examined, see their projects significantly altered by their Parliaments.

With a strong comparative framework, this coherent volume examines fourteen countries and provides a detailed investigation into the mechanisms by which governments in different countries determine the agendas of their corresponding parliaments. It explores the three different ways that governments can shape legislative outcomes: institutional, partisan and positional, to make an important contribution to legislative politics.

It will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, legislative studies/parliamentary research, governments/coalition politics, political economy, and policy studies.

1
Governments and legislative agenda setting

An introduction

George Tsebelis and Bjørn Erik Rasch

Traditionally, political science has been built on a series of institutional dichotomies. Regimes have been classified into presidential and parliamentary (Verney 1959, Linz 1992, 1994, Horowitz 1996, Stepan and Skach 1993) as well as semi-presidential ones (Duverger 1980); party systems are divided into two- and multi-party systems; parliaments are divided into unicameral and bicameral; parties are divided into strong (or disciplined) and weak (or undisciplined). Lijphart (1999) provides the definitions for these distinctions and organizes them on the basis of his consociational analysis.

More recent analyses focus on the issue of agenda setting and consider agenda setting a major determinant of policy outcomes (McKelvey 1976, Romer and Rosenthal 1978, Shepsle and Weingast 1984, Tsebelis 1994, Franchino and Høyland 2009, Döring and Hallerberg 2004). Even more, for some formal analyses agenda setting determines regime type as well. Diermeier and Feddersen (1998) argue that in parliamentary systems, the parties in government share agenda setting power, excluding the opposition, because of the confidence vote. As a result, party and government cohesion and discipline are higher in parliamentary than in presidential regimes. Along the same lines, Persson and Tabellini (2000) argue that there is more competition among parties in presidential than in parliamentary regimes because coalitions are stable in the latter but not in the former. Tsebelis (2002) argues that in presidential regimes the legislative agenda is controlled by the parliament, while in parliamentary regimes control is held by the government (the opposite of what the names suggest), but argues that further study of legislative details is necessary in order to classify different systems in a continuum. Similarly, Cheibub and Limongi (2002: 176) argue:

The reality of both parliamentary and presidential regimes is more complex than what it would be if we were to derive these systems’ entire behavior from their first principles. So, what explains the difference? We suspect that the main difference between the two regimes is due to the way the decision-making process is organized.

This book focuses on the agenda setting powers of different (mostly parliamentary) governments. It is part of a series of attempts to focus on the agenda setting process in a more empirically accurate and systematic way. Our argument is that agenda setting power depends not only on the institutional features of a political system (e.g., who can ask questions and who is prevented from doing so), but also on the ideological positions and the cohesion of different actors. The main point we make in this introduction and throughout the book is that an approach that combines the institutional characteristics of a political system with the positions of different actors enables the researcher to understand new policy positions the political system may adopt.

This introduction is organized into four parts. The first part identifies the institutional mechanisms that determine agenda setting in different political systems. The second part studies agenda setting in general and identifies likely outcomes as a function of the existing veto players, the status quo, and the identity and location of the agenda setter. The third part studies implications of the institutional differences across political systems. The final section introduces the country chapters of the volume.

Dimensions of agenda setting

Empirical research on legislative outcomes comparing different countries has mainly focused on the institutions regulating the interaction between the legislature and the executive (Shugart and Carey 1992, Döring 1995a, b, 2001, Tsebelis and Aleman 2005, Tsebelis and Rizova 2007). We argue that this information is not sufficient for understanding the influence of different actors in the legislative process – we also need information about the ideological location of these actors. More specifically, we argue that in the absence of a stable single party majority (where government and parliament are identical in terms of policy preferences and there is no difference in expected outcomes regardless of which actor controls the agenda), agenda setting is of paramount importance in politics, because the agenda setter selects among the many possible alternatives the one that (s)he prefers the most. Whether this proposal will go to an up or down vote, or whether it will be modified, and by how much, determines the policy outcomes that will prevail in a political system.

In this book we concentrate on three different ways that governments can shape legislative outcomes. The first method is institutional: a series of provisions in constitutions or in parliamentary rules of procedure give the government the ability to restrain parliamentary amendment activities. The second method is partisan: by controlling a majority of seats in parliament governments can impose their will (provided their majority is cohesive). Most legislative decisions are reached by a simple majority of votes and a cohesive government majority obviously outnumbers the opposition parties. The challenges are quite different in situations with minority governments, which are not as uncommon as previously believed (Strøm 1990), where the opposition constitutes a (non-cohesive) majority. The third method is positional: by being located in the middle of the political space governments can select the final outcomes of parliamentary debates even if they do not have institutional advantages or stable majorities. Here we elaborate on the institutional dimension and two positional features: the dispersion of veto players, which inversely affects the power of the agenda setter, and the question of the centrality of the agenda setter.

The institutional dimension of agenda setting in theoretical and empirical studies

The institutional dimension of agenda setting is the most studied in the literature and the principal goal of this book. Here we review the literature and enumerate the specific provisions of agenda setting. Political writers knew the importance of first move advantage very early. Livy, in his History of Rome (6.37), has made the following argument:

The tribunes of the plebs were now objects of contempt since their power was shattering itself by their own veto. There could be no fair or just administration as long as the executive power was in the hands of the other party, while they had only the right of protesting by their veto; nor would the plebs ever have an equal share in the government till the executive authority was thrown open to them.

Livy here differentiates between the simple veto power, which some players dispose, and the “executive power” or “executive authority,” which provides the real ability to make choices (influence outcomes, select options, etc.).

However, the theoretical argument for the importance of agenda setting in multidimensional policy spaces was first presented by McKelvey (1976) in his famous “chaos theorem.” McKelvey demonstrated that because majority preferences in Euclidean spaces cycle if an agenda setter can introduce multiple questions he can get his most favored outcome to prevail (no matter what his preferences are). In fact, McKelvey demonstrates that majority rule can lead literally anywhere in space. If the agenda setter can ask the question only once (which is the case in real legislatures), even if his ideal point cannot be obtained, he can improve significantly (from his point of view) the outcome of the political process.

McKelvey’s argument also applies in single dimensional spaces: the agenda setter has significant impact over the final outcome. The paper that made the consequences of this proposition understood was Romer and Rosenthal (1978) that demonstrated that whoever controls the agenda of a referendum can have a decisive influence on the referendum outcome. In their classic setter-model, amendments were not allowed and the power of the agenda setter was based on an exclusive right to make “take-it-or-leave-it” offers.

Once the importance of agenda setting was established, multiple studies of the phenomenon appeared in different areas of political science. In the U.S. House of Representatives committees were responsible for setting the agenda because they could operate under closed rule (that is, not accept any amendments to their proposal), while the corresponding assumption for the Senate was that debates in this chamber take place under open rule (Shepsle and Weingast 1981, 1984, 1987, Cox and McCubbins 2005). Referendums were classified in different categories on the basis of who can ask the voters questions and who can trigger referendums (Hug and Tsebelis 2002). Committee composition and chairs (in Congress), and raporteurs (MPs who propose bills for consideration in front of European parliaments), or ministers, became the object of numerous studies: Shepsle (1978), Krehbiel (1990), Londregan and Snyder (1994) and Groseclose (1994) among others for the U.S. Congress; Tsebelis (1994, 1997), Bowler and Farrell (1995) and Kreppel (2002) for the European Parliament; Laver and Shepsle (1994, 1996) for ministers in European governments and Mattson and Strøm (1995) for committees in European parliaments; Londregan (2000) for Chile’s Senate; finally, Shugart and Carey (1992) for presidential and semi-presidential systems, and Döring (1995a, b, c) for parliamentary systems subsequently studied comparatively and in detail for specific institutional provisions defining agenda setting.

The agenda setting literature places different regimes in a continuum, so that comparativists – instead of speaking of presidential and parliamentary systems by contrasting them – can move further and identify similarities as well as differences in many dimensions. Lijphart (1984b, 1999) made a first step by creating a measure of “executive dominance” as one of the dimensions that differentiates majoritarian from consensus democracies. However, he assessed the scores of different countries either on the basis of government duration (most parliamentary systems), or (for presidential systems) on impressionistic grounds (for example Colombia receives 3, while the US and Costa Rica 1, and the UK 5.52 in his scale). Tsebelis (2002) has argued that an index generated on the basis of agenda setting in parliamentary systems correlates highly with Lijphart’s “executive dominance” scale. In his argument he uses the institutional details described by Shugart and Carey (1992) for presidential systems and Döring (1995b) for parliamentary ones.

Shugart and Carey (1992) develop a system of scoring the powers of presidents in 44 constitutions. They estimate the relative strengths of popularly elected presidents based on two dimensions of presidential power: legislative (exclusive introduction, veto, decree, budget prerogatives, and referendum) and non-legislative powers (authority over the cabinet and the possibility that the president can dissolve the Assembly and call unanticipated elections). They argue that the most powerful presidencies also tend to be the most problematic and caution about the stability of such regimes. In their view

dual democratic legitimacies decried by critics of presidentialism – the claim that no democratic principle exist to resolve conflicts over who better can claim to represent the “will” of the electorate – are minimized to the extent that an assembly is accorded a more powerful role in legislation than is the president.

(Shugart and Carey 1992: 197)

Döring (1995b) argues that time in the legislative process is a scarce resource and that the government, through agenda setting devices, can exert control over the passage of legislation. With a focus on the cross-national procedures affecting the control over the time allotted for discussion and the selection of proposals that arise for a vote, he classifies agenda setting powers in 18 Western European countries. The results show that where the government is able to control the plenary agenda (issues that come up for debate in the order of the day), it is also able to assert its will concerning the committee’s timetable. In his conclusion to a more recent paper on policy consequences of agenda setting, Döring (2001: 162) argues:

It is now obvious that there exist a great deal of variation in agenda-setting devices among the parliamentary systems of Western Europe. This surprising variety is far larger than one would have expected from the traditional distinction between parliamentary and presidential systems.

Whether it is Lijphart, who classifies presidential systems as “weak” on executive dominance or other researchers who have identified a “paradox” of weak presidencies, most of the literature agrees that, in general, presidents are weaker than prime ministers.¹

Tsebelis and Aleman (2005) and Aleman and Tsebelis (2005) study presidential systems in Latin America, and identify one significant power of some Latin American presidents: some of them can introduce an “amendatory observation” in legislation. If they exercise this option, the amendment that they introduce in a bill has to be debated and voted in Congress. The default solution varies by country: in some cases the amendment is considered adopted unless Congress rejects it (sometimes qualified majority is required for such a rejection). Other times, a simple majority in Congress in favor of the amendatory observation is required for this amendment to enter into effect. The authors make the argument that these systems are located in an intermediate position between presidential and parliamentary systems. Tsebelis and Rizova (2007) have replicated these studies for ex-communist countries and identify the same mechanisms of agenda control as in Latin American countries.

In pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Governments and legislative agenda setting: An introduction
• 2 Germany: Limited government agenda control and strong minority rights
• 3 France: Systematic institutional advantage of government in lawmaking
• 4 Italy: Government alternation and legislative agenda setting
• 5 United Kingdom: Extreme institutional dominance by the executive … most of the time
• 6 Hungary: Changing government advantages – challenging a dominant executive
• 7 The Netherlands: Legislative agenda setting and the politics of strategic lock-in
• 8 Switzerland: Agenda setting power of the government in a separation-of-powers framework
• 9 Greece: Government as the dominant player
• 10 Spain: Majoritarian choices, disciplined party government and compliant legislature
• 11 Portugal: Limited government and the influential role of parliament
• 12 Russia: The executive in a leading role
• 13 Denmark: Agenda control and veto rights to opposition parties
• 14 Norway: Institutionally weak governments and parliamentary voting on bills
• 15 Japan: Decades of partisan advantages impeding cabinet’s agenda setting power
• 16 Conclusion
• Index