Obstruction in parliaments: a cross-national perspective

Bell, Lauren C.

doi:10.1080/13572334.2018.1544694

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Our dynamic temporal perspective on democratic governance also complements the more general literature on legislative obstruction (Bell 2018;Fong and Krehbiel 2018;Patty 2015), 3 which is considered a prominent phenomenon in parliamentary democracies (Bücker 1989;Cox and McCubbins 2011;Döring 1995) and bicameral systems (Tsebelis and Money 1997). Our dynamic temporal perspective allows for ministers learning from past policy-making experiences and adapting their behavior in order to reduce the amount of scrutiny and improve the governmental record.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“…In policy making, a dilemma arises when coalition parties pursue divergent policy positions for electoral purposes but can only implement one government bill jointly (Laver and Shepsle 1996;Martin and Vanberg 2005;2014;2020b;Müller and Strøm 1999). In addition to this dilemma, a temporal challenge exists for the passage of government bills within a term that may limit the implementation of the governmental policy agenda when coalition policy divergence increases the risk of gridlock (Bäck and Carroll 2018;Tsebelis 2002) with obstruction and delay (Bell 2018;Döring 1995;Martin 2004). From a principal-agent perspective on coalition government, the office-holding minister enjoys a firstmover advantage for drafting government bills in her portfolio, but strong parliamentary institutions allow coalition partners to scrutinize and amend those bills, which can lengthen the duration of the policy-making process (Becher 2010;Carroll and Cox 2012;Martin and Vanberg 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

et al. 2021

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Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

et al. 2021

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“…First, higher fragmentation is often associated with more parliamentary party groups that demand access to scarce resources such as plenary time, question rights, or attractive positions within parliament. As minorities in virtually all parliaments can use (or threaten to use) legislative procedures for obstructive purposes (Bell, 2018;Bu ¨cker, 1989), their concerns have to be accommodated to some extent, which can trigger denser institutional regulation of legislative processes, e.g. via a more detailed regulation of agenda setting or the creation of a more sophisticated committee system.…”

Section: Theory and Hypotheses: How Party System Change Should Affect...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Do party system parameters explain differences in legislative organization? Fragmentation, polarization, and the density of regulation in European parliaments, 1945–2009

Sieberer

Höhmann

2021

Party Politics

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The article studies whether the party system characteristics fragmentation and ideological polarization increase the density of institutional regulation in parliaments. It introduces a comprehensive time-series-cross-sectional dataset of standing orders in 15 Western European parliaments that allows studying how densely various fields of legislative activity such as lawmaking, controlling the government, and creating publicity were regulated over a period of more than 60 years. Descriptively, the data show increased regulation in all areas but also some variation between countries. Dynamic panel regression analyses for non-stationary time series find no systematic effect of fragmentation or polarization on the density of regulation indicating that large parts of legislative organization change for reasons unrelated to party system dynamics. We identify changes in the environment of legislatures such as increasing complexity and professionalization of politics, technological change, and Europeanization as potential drivers of such Pareto-efficient reforms.

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“…However, minority rights can also be used for obstructive purposes (Humphries 1991;Müller & Sieberer 2014;Bell 2018) and thus hurt the parliamentary majority, which we assume is policy-motivated (Laver & Schofield 1990: Chapter 3). Parliamentary procedures often give minorities influence over various aspects of parliamentary business such as setting the plenary agenda (Döring 1995;Cox & McCubbins 2011), introducing bills and amendments (Heller 2001), voicing concerns in speeches and questions (Russo & Wiberg 2010;Proksch & Slapin 2015;Bäck & Debus 2016), and staffing leadership positions in parliament (Carroll et al 2006).…”

Section: How Policy Conflict 'Goes Institutional': Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

Sieberer

Dutkowski

Meißner

et al. 2020

European J Political Res

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When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority-friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single-country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

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Obstruction in parliaments: a cross-national perspective

Cited by 9 publications

References 18 publications

Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

Do party system parameters explain differences in legislative organization? Fragmentation, polarization, and the density of regulation in European parliaments, 1945–2009

‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

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