GOVERNMENT ALTERNATION AND LEGISLATIVE AGENDA SETTING

Francesco

Zucchini

Razvan Moraru Positive Political Theory EPS, 2013

Presentation plan Research question Types of agenda setting powers The model :

Characteristics Empirical implications

Government alternation Case study : Italy Conclusions Annexes

Research question

Why does the cabinet in some parliamentary democracies enjoy an undisputed role, while in others the parliament continues to play the role of co-protagonist?

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Setting the agenda for parliament is the most significant institutional weapon for governments to shape policy outcomes

• France

• UK

Significant agenda setting power

• Netherlands • Italy

Lack agenda setting powers

Preferred outcome

Significantly altered projects by Parliament

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Regarding our research question, we argue that in pivotal party systems, with limited government alternation, it is much more difficult to strengthen the government vis-à-vis the parliament.

According to Tsebelis, in parliamentary democracies the government ‘collectively’ enjoys the legislative agenda-setting power and conflict among governing parties should be a key factor in explaining legislative change.

One factor that prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the cabinet in this situation is the lack of opportunities for, and expectations of, a large and controversial policy change.

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The author hypothesizes that, first, a high level of government alternation strengthens the agenda-setting power of the government – government alternation is a necessary and sufficient condition for a less frequent use of the amendment power from the parliament; and second, government alternation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of new rules that formally and permanently increase the agenda-setting power of the government – an increase of the government’s ideological homogeneity is the other necessary condition

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The main hypothesis, inferred from a very simple model, is that in a parliamentary democracy any increase in government alternation positively affects the legislative agenda setting power of the government through the relative position of the status quo. The model's predictions are tested both by analyzing a specific Italian legislative

instrument (the so-called deleghe) a cross national correlation between the

degree of the government alternation and the degree of the government legislative agenda setting power.

Identification of the elements affecting lawmaking procedures.

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The model shares some important features with the “Veto Players theory” (Tsebelis 2002) and the procedural cartel theory (Cox&McCubbins 2005), but it does not seek to investigate policy change per se.

Rather, it is interested in the procedures and practices adopted to pass laws because different procedures and practices bestow upon the government different degrees of agenda setting power. In the model, each government party may block any proposal of legislative change as it enjoys a veto power.

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No strong assumption is made about the identity of the government agenda setter. It can be the prime minister, usually belonging to the main government party or the government actor farthest from the status quo. Alternatively, it can be assumed that, in bargaining over government formation, parties try to win those ministries in the policy areas whose status quo they consider more important to protect (Laver & Shepsle 1996). In this case, the primary agenda setter would be the party actor nearest to the status quo as viewed in the next spatial illustration of the model

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The two explanatory variables, in the Table above , the ideological heterogeneity of the government and the size of the alternation, are operationalized in four different ways, grouped into two categories. The first category is direct operationalisation.

Party positions available from both expert surveys and party manifestos are considered. The median voter position in the parliament is assumed to coincide with the median party position in the parliament. The expert survey data come from Laver and Hunt (1992) regarding the issue of ‘raising taxes to increase public services’ (score 1) versus ‘cutting public services to cut taxes’ (score 20).

With regards to the party manifesto data, the party positions are extracted using the statistical technique suggested by Gabel and Huber (2000), called the ‘vanilla method’. We produce the same variables as those created employing

expert survey data.3

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For analytical purpose, the options of the parliament are grouped into three categories:

Adopting a rule granting amendment powers to the parliamentary floor: procedure r = o. The government chooses a policy and a parliamentary majority adopts it under open rule.

Adopting a rule preventing a government agreement from being amended from the floor: procedure r = c. Once the bill is proposed, the majority of the parliament decides to give up the right to amend. The government chooses a policy and a parliamentary majority adopts it under ‘closed rule’. The final outcome is g.

Changing the rules: procedure r = n. Parliament, before dealing with the bill proposed by the government, creates a new rule that allows the government to propose the bill with a take-it-or leave-it option at the onset of the legislative process.

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Government alternation crucially affects the position of the status quo and the perception of its stability. Rare alternation, the status quo in different

policy areas is less likely to be between the government and the opposition. It is likely to be within the present government’s range or, at the most, marginally on its left or right. In this case, the status quo is mostly the outcome of decisions taken by a previous government that is ideologically very similar to the present one.

Stable alternation is a feature of the party system, a decrease of the government’s ideological heterogeneity increases the probability of a change of the rules in favor of the government.

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Therefore, the empirical implication of the model can be summarized in the following two hypotheses:

A high level of government alternation strengthens the agenda-setting power of the government. Government alternation is a necessary and sufficient condition for a less frequent use of the amendment power from the parliament

Government alternation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of new rules that increase formally and permanently the agenda-setting power of the government. An increase of the government ideological homogeneity is the other necessary condition.

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To understand how the legislative rules and practices evolve and why they differ across parliamentary systems one has to understand what makes a legislative rule or practice more convenient for a parliamentary majority, which in the end has the last word in adopting standing orders and legislative procedures (Krehbiel 1991).

More specifically, one has to understand the circumstances under which a parliamentary majority finds it convenient to deprive itself, occasionally or permanently, of some prerogatives in favor of the government.

Alternation and agenda-setting power: Italian Case study

Government alternation usually also implies non-centrist governments (Sartori 1976).

This relation between alternation and non-centrist governments links the present article to the recent hypothesis of Tsebelis (2007) on coalition formation. Tsebelis found that when institutional advantages are low, the process of forming a government will centre on the positional advantages of the agenda setting and on the central location of the formateur party within the policy space. Consequently, the countries with weak governmental agenda-setting powers tend to choose centrist parties, and as such they are characterized by a pattern of centrist governments. While the author argues that the lack of alternation and the associated centrism of government explains the weak degree of governmental agenda-setting power, Tsebelis claims that weak government agenda-setting power explains the existence of centrist governments and the lack of government alternation associated therewith.

Which comes first? Alternation or legislative agenda setting

An analysis of the recent development of the legislative agenda-setting powers in Italy lends some support to the causal story the author suggests (Zucchini 2010) vis-à-vis that of Tsebelis.

In terms of the Döring index of legislative agenda-setting power, the Italian government had been relatively weak for the whole First Republic. However, after the changes in the electoral rules and the collapse of the old party system in 1994, changes in the formal rules have been quite marginal (Zucchini 2010), but the change in the use of existing rules has led to a strengthening of the Italian government’s position.

There is a special procedure to give legislative authority to the cabinet in a way that reproduces the same advantages offered by the closed rule. This rule has indeed been in force for the whole postwar period and its existence did not prevent the very long period of centrist politics in Italy.

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Using Italy as an example we can state that the Italian politics has been going through a significant political and institutional transformation. The legislative arena has been affected by

a series of important changes. The government seems to play a stronger

role in legislative agenda-setting than was the case during previous decades.

Despite this, no attempts have made to systematically link the above-mentioned transformation to changes in the broader political environment.

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We see that while alternation creates the need to change the practices within the same institutional framework, the window of opportunity for a formal innovation of the procedures opens only when the ideological heterogeneity of the government decreases. The study of the Italian case supports this hypothesis. The formal rules of Italian lawmaking have not changed enough to justify the end of the centrist politics and the coming of government alternation. On the contrary, government alternation, made possible by both the collapse of the old party system and the new electoral rules, seems to have affected the government agenda-setting power by increasing the use of special procedures existing since the early days of the Republic, but rarely used.

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The central hypothesis of this article is that by affecting the relative position of the status quo, both real and expected party-system dynamics also affect the legislative agenda-setting power of the government in parliamentary democracies.

In a competitive party system characterized by large alternation, government parties and the majority in the parliament are better off relying on those procedures that limit the debate and preclude the legislative assembly from amending government proposals. The causal mechanism behind this hypothesis follows the argument recently proposed by Cox (2006) to explain the evolution of rules and procedures in the legislatures: ‘All busy legislatures will evolve rules that create inequalities in members’ access to plenary time and diminish ordinary members’ ability to delay.’

Conclusion.

Even if the analysis does not seem to disconfirm this hypothesis and the present shortage of cases covered by author invites caution and further study, we understand that the parliaments are not all equally busy and the cabinets are not always the beneficiary in the government alternation and legislative agenda setting agenda-setting power distribution. Opportunities for policy change make parliaments busier, but only their controversial nature makes the government stronger.

Anexes

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