Vehicles of opposition influence or agents of the governing majority? Legislative committees and private members’ bills in the Hungarian Országgyűlés and the Israeli Knesset

ABSTRACT

In this article, we assess the role and the strength of the legislative committee system of two legislatures: the Hungarian Országgyűlés and the Israeli Knesset, by looking at the fate of private member bills over the past four legislative cycles (1998–2014 in Hungary and 2006–2019 in Israel). We find that Israeli committees allow opposition PMBs to succeed at a significantly higher rate than Hungarian committees do, even though the formal properties of the two committee systems are very similar: during the examined period, more than one-fifth of the laws that were passed by the Knesset were initiated as opposition sponsored PMB, whereas the corresponding number in the Országgyűlés was only one per cent. The central reason for this unexpected divergence in the success rate of opposition sponsored PMBs, in spite of a favourable institutional setting shared by the committee systems of the two parliaments, may lie in the different degrees of party concentration in the two legislative party systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative committees
• private member bills
• Israel
• Hungary
• Knesset
• Országgyűlés

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (435-2016-1470) and the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies as well as the assistance of Lior Saadi for collecting the Israeli legislation data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Csaba Nikolenyi is a Professor at the Department of Political Science and Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. Email: [email protected].

Chen Friedberg is a senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science at Ariel University, Ariel and a research fellow in the Israel Democracy Institute, Jeruslaem. E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1. A private member bill shall not be approved for tabling by the Knesset Presidium if it expressly, or by implication, includes the negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state or incites to racism (Knesset Rule of Procedures, article 75(e)).

2. PMBs are debated in this ministerial committee 45 days after being tabled in the Knesset plenary and before the preliminary reading. Governmental bills are debated in the committee before the first reading.

3. During the 17th Knesset (2006–2009) the committee opposed to 60 per cent of all PMBs debated in it, during the 18th Knesset (2009–2013) it opposed to 56 per cent of all PMBs debated in it, during the 19th Knesset (2013–2015) it opposed to 43 per cent of all PMBs debated in it, and during the 20th Knesset (2015–2019) it opposed to 19 per cent of all PMBs debated in it (but the debate on 64 per cent of the bills was postponed to another time). The data are taken from the Legislation Report – 2017, Ministry of Justice.