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Governments, Parliaments and Legislative Activity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2015

Thomas Bräuninger ,
Marc Debus  and
Fabian Wüst
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Abstract

Various strands of literature in comparative politics suggest that there is a differential impact of the type of government and their supporting legislative coalitions in parliamentary democracies, for example, in terms of their size and ideological heterogeneity, and on their potential to induce policy change. Most studies in this area focus on governments as agenda-setters, possibly neglecting the role of parliaments as a further key actor in policy making. In this article, we address the broader question as to how patterns of conflict within parliament effect legislative activity of governments and parliamentary actors. Through a simultaneous analysis of the success and event history of over 12,000 legislative bills in three parliamentary systems and one semi-presidential system from 1986 until 2003, we show how the interplay of actor motivations and institutional settings has a discriminating impact on the potential of both the government and parliament to induce policy change.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 529 - 554
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Thomas Bräuninger is professor of political economy at the School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68131 Mannheim, Germany ([email protected]). Marc Debus is professor of comparative government at the School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68131 Mannheim, Germany ([email protected]). Fabian Wüst is a senior market researcher at Credit Suisse, Uetlibergstrasse 231, 8045 Zurich, Switzerland ([email protected]). Funding from DFG grant BR 1851/3 is gratefully acknowledged.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/27333
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