Disentangling legislative duration in coalitional presidential systems

ABSTRACT

The speed and actions that bills face in legislatures vary immensely, but we do not have a comprehensive framework to analyse legislative durations. Moreover, the absence of data detailing legislative activities and durations in distinct stages of legislative processes hinders analysis. This article presents a framework for analysing legislative delay in coalitional presidential systems and examines unique data on durations, attributes, and parliamentary activities in legislative processes at the level of individual proposals. The empirical analysis investigates executive proposals considered by the Brazilian Congress and seeks to disentangle when duration means legislative activism, when it is due to political conflict, and when it only represents inertia. Our analysis indicates substantial activities in both content-influencing legislative activism and politically motivated obstructionism. Hence, political conflict is as important a source as policy disagreement in accounting for legislative delay. By examining a hitherto untapped area with rich data, this study opens up new venues for rigorous analyses of legislative durations and gridlock.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative process
• legislative duration
• gridlock
• coalitional presidentialism
• obstructionism
• parliamentary activism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Taeko Hiroi is Professor of Political Science at The University of Texas at El Paso. Her research areas include legislative politics, electoral systems, corruption, democratisation, political instability, and comparative and international political economy. Prof. Hiroi is currently working on legislative coalitions and obstructionism, fairness in elections and electoral accountability, and autocratic backsliding and coup d’état. Some of her recent publications appear in Comparative Political Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Legislative Studies, International Political Science Review, and Democratization. Her most recent book is Regional Integration and Democratic Conditionality.

Lucio R. Rennó is Associate (Adjunto) Professor in the Political Science Institute of the University of Brasilia. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Prof. Rennó is currently on leave from the University of Brasilia and holds the position of President of the Federal District Planning Company (Codeplan), a public firm that conducts household surveys, data analysis, and public policy evaluation. Prof. Rennó has widely published in the areas of legislative politics, voting behaviour, and public opinion.

Notes

1. The only exception is legislative decrees (decreto legislativo), which is an exclusive prerogative of the congress.

2. For an extensive discussion of the Brazilian legislative process, see Hiroi & Rennó (2016).

3. It excludes proposals submitted by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is technically a part of the executive branch. The dataset does not include presidential decrees called medidas provisórias (provisional measures) since they are not legislative bills. Presidents issue provisional measures, which go into effect immediately, and Congress need to decide to either accept, reject, or modify these decrees within a constitutionally specified deadline.

4. Proposal information was obtained from the Chamber of Deputies’ Centro de Documentação e Informação (2012). We supplemented additional information using the Chamber’s online proposal database. There were some errors and incompleteness in the summary portions of some proposals in the Chamber proposal data. For example, some committee proposals were classified as executive proposals in the summary. We fixed those problems in our dataset.

5. The Chamber can override Senate-approved but amended executive bills due to being the initial house to examine executive proposals.

6. Administrative policy includes restructuring of ministries and other government entities including the military, personnel matters of government employees, donations of unused furniture by the federal government and federal agencies, etc. Codes and rights include such areas as criminal codes, electoral codes, prison sentences, financial crimes, consumers’ rights, etc. Economic policy covers trade, economic development, monetary and fiscal policies not covered by tax policies, etc. Commemorative includes, for example, naming and renaming bridges and airports to honor someone and designating a particular day or week to promote a cause. Budget and tax policies include anything related to taxes and tax-like “contributions,” budgetary proposals, extraordinary credit, etc. Political and institutional reforms include electoral reforms, judicial reforms, laws related to parties, etc. Social policy covers labour policy, environment, pension reform, education, etc. Foreign policy includes international agreements, policy toward certain countries or regions, regional integration, etc.

7. Inertia in the areas of commemorative policy may result when such policies are proposed by the executive branch. On the contrary, when legislators propose bills in these areas, they may move the legislative process relatively quickly when bills proposed by legislators are considered. There are two reasons: (1) those bills propose low-cost changes in the issue-areas that are of great interest to particular legislators, which may generate mutual support for such legislative initiatives among legislators (i.e. logrolling) with hardly any opposition from the executive branch and (2) this type of bills is likely to be examined in an abbreviated process with the conclusive power of committees.

8. The Senate is comprised of 81 members elected by a majoritarian rule.

9. Not being scheduled for floor deliberation does not necessarily mean that those bills died in the Chamber. As discussed previously, committees’ conclusive power can dispense the need for floor deliberation for the passage of proposals. When committees reject bills without being appealed on the floor, it is also considered deliberation under conclusive power. In our dataset, 25 per cent (363 bills) were examined under conclusive power in the Chamber of Deputies.

10. Bills were considered having been discussed or deliberated on the floor if substantive activities, such as floor debates and voting, took place. Mere reading of committee reports or receiving of amendment proposals without deliberation does not constitute floor deliberation.

11. Occasionally, the steering committee orders to recommence the deliberation process by returning bills to relevant committees. For all proposals, our data record the time from the first day of plenary discussion to the day of conclusion, irrespective of whether the proposal was returned to committee deliberation.

12. We thank Frederico Bertholini for sharing with us his data on cabinet proportionality, number of parties in the governing coalition, and share of Chamber seats held by the parties in the governing coalition. All other variables were collected and coded by the author.

13. Although Hiroi and Rennó (2014a) interacted cabinet proportionality with the total size of the coalition’s legislative seats in the Chamber, we use the number of parties in the coalition in lieu of coalition size to capture the coalition’s internal heterogeneity and potential rivalry within it, as the total seat share does not necessarily indicate coalition heterogeneity.