Abstract
The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this article analyses the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) from 1990 to 2013. My independent variable is an index offering an immediate picture of the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments, while the dependent variable is the ‘detailed’ legislative production of those governments. If we are able to differentiate between governments who decide, and governments who do not, we could answer a considerable number of interesting questions: which Western European parliamentary democracies tend to produce more (detailed) laws and which – on the contrary – are used to facing greater difficulties for achieving that goal? What are the reasons behind these opposing trends? The empirical results largely confirms that the more a parliamentary government has got decision-making potential (in terms of the proposed index), the more likely it will pass ‘detailed’ legislation.
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Notes
A number of coalition theories have analysed the composition of cabinets, the allocation of ministerial portfolios and governments’ more or less marked capacity to endure over the course of time.
The vast majority of scholars of public policies are likely to divide the policy-making process into: a step characterized by the identification and planning of the policy problem (which not necessarily leads to the entrance of the issue in the political agenda); a real decision-making stage (generally corresponding to the parliamentary iter of the legislative measure); a step characterized by the implementation of the decision by bureaucrats. Thus, the policy output depends on the evolution of the normative content in each of these stages: the more the constraints that have been set in an earlier stage, the less the allowed discretion in the next stage.
And, according to that: what relationship – if any – between these two models of democracy and the well-known Lijphart’s (1999) majoritarian democracy-consensus democracy continuum?
While – in presidential systems – the main determinant of legislative productivity is usually assumed to be ‘divided’ or ‘unified’ government (Edwards et al, 1997; Howell et al, 2000).
The alternation between opposite governments can result from the legislative activity of the government: on one hand, the incumbent government can be sanctioned because it was unable to legislate for some reason; on the other hand, it can also be sanctioned because of its strong capacity to legislate and develop policies removed by the median voter (Downs, 1957).
This is a common problem in Italy, as a result of the importance, in the past (and to some extent, at present too) of members of the majority coalition who fail to toe the party line, and vote against governmental proposals.
There is also a stochastic variable among the various reasons that lead a government, once in office, to change the current status quo. This stochastic variable is usually linked to the sudden occurrence of problems and unforeseen events. The distance between successive coalitions taking up office is just one reason, and not the only one, for the government’s decisions.
The option concerning the weighted average of all partisan positions would not have been in keeping with the ‘absorbed veto players theory’ proposed by Tsebelis (2002).
More in detail, I constructed the indicator by multiplying the coefficient accounting for the political distance between successive governments, by the coefficient accounting for each government’s legislative production (expressed in standardized pages per day).
For example, a government whose internal cohesion is 0.2 would produce a coefficient of 0.6. Indeed: (0.5−0.2)/0.5=0.3/0.5=0.6.
That index was originally based on the combination of seven variables: the authority to determine the Plenary Agenda of Parliament; money bills as a governmental prerogative; the Committee stage of a bill being preceded, or otherwise, by a plenary decision; the authority of Committees to rewrite Government bills; control over the timetable of legislative Committees; curtailing debate before the final voting of a bill in a plenary session; the maximum lifespan of a bill pending approval after which it lapses if not adopted. Tsebelis (2002) used the principal components and the first factor loadings to weigh each one of these variables and then he normalized the weighted sum.
For example, a value of −0.5 on the Döring–Tsebelis Index (−1/+1) has been converted in 0.25, while a value of +0.5 has been converted in 0.75.
In order to avoid the risk of multicollinearity among independent variables (Blalock, 1963).
This point requires clarification: if the GDPI of a government is worth 0 points, it does not mean that that government has no decision-making resources at all. That government simply displays the lowest possible rates with regard to all the dimensions taken into consideration.
Whatever the ‘quality’ – in terms of relevancy and/or with respect to whether or not that legislation actually solves problems – of those policy outputs.
The cardinal variable ‘Time’ has been constructed by matching each year with the relevant government’s legislative productivity.
In particular with respect to the executive parties dimension whose variables are quite similar to those used in this study: the Pearson correlation between GDPI and Lijphart’s first dimension (data from 1981 to 2010) (Lijphart, 2012) is equal to 0.842 (significant at P=0.000 level).
However, it is important not to overemphasize this aspect, as Lijphart’s claims about the superiority of consensus democracy does not refer to the same concept or measure of government decision-making ‘effectiveness’ here developed.
As far as the 1993 Law is concerned, this happened because parties started a process designed to create a majoritarian system, which nevertheless retained certain aspects of the proportional system. As for the 2005 Law, both its proportional characteristics and the majority prize that is awarded to the winning coalition, represent structural incentives to the creation of catch-all coalitions composed of many parties.
The Pearson correlation between GDPI and the average number of standardized pages is equal to 0.813 (significant at the 0.01 level).
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Pritoni, A. Decision-making potential and ‘detailed’ legislation of Western European parliamentary governments (1990–2013). Comp Eur Polit 15, 157–179 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2014.55