To amend or not to amend: under what circumstances do Spanish legislators propose amendments to executive bills?

Abstract

Based on a new comprehensive dataset containing information on 93,722 amendments, this article explores the circumstances under which Spanish legislators propose amendments to executive bills. Our results show that legislators respond to variations in both governmental factors and bargaining dynamics. In single-party minority governments, ad hoc legislature agreements translate into more amendments. However, legislators do not introduce significantly fewer amendments under absolute majority governments, when the chances of their proposals being accepted fall. After controlling for many confounders, the results show that amending activity reacts to attention allocation dynamics – mediatised bills receive more amendments – but not to variations in contextual factors – the number of amendments does not significantly increase when the economic situation deteriorates. Finally, bills associated with a greater number of committee appearances from interest groups, experts and public officials are more often the target of amendments, signalling that an informational logic is also at play.

Keywords:

• Legislative amendments
• governmental factors
• attention dynamics
• media
• economic crisis
• parliamentary appearances

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on preliminary versions of the paper. We also thank Andreu Rodilla for his invaluable work as research assistant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Comprehensive databases covering at least a 10-year period exist, to our knowledge, for Germany and the Netherlands (Martin and Vanberg 2005; König et al. 2023); Denmark (Damgaard and Jensen 2006; König et al. 2023), France (Kerrouche 2006) and Italy (Capano and Vignati 2008; Pedrazzani and Zucchini 2013). Data based on a sample of bills exist also for the UK and Scotland (Griffith 1974; Shephard and Cairney 2005; Russell and Cowley 2016; Russell et al. 2016; Russell and Gover 2017). Based on recent methodological advances, such as text-reuse methods (e.g. Wilkerson et al. 2015; Casas et al. 2020), new metrics have been developed to quantify amendments made during the legislative process in Hungary, the UK, Switzerland and Germany (see Sebok et al. 2018; Dixon and Jones 2019; Gava et al. 2021; Behrens et al. 2023, respectively).

2 Strong institutional environments are associated with a high number of legislative committees, close correspondence between committees and cabinet ministries, small legislative committee size, non-binding plenary debates before the committee stage, committees with rights to compel testimony and documents, few possibilities of using urgency procedures to pass legislation, committees with capacity to set the floor agenda and ministers with no rights to reject amendments or force an up-or-down vote on a bill (Martin and Vanberg 2020, pp. 4-5).

3 Amendments to the whole text can be of two types: return amendments, calling for the return of the bill to the executive; or amendments proposing a completely alternative text.

4 Indeed, parliamentary records regarding amendments signal the group and not the individual MPs that introduce them.

5 In total, we excluded 70 executive bills including those that had either expired, were withdrawn or passed on to the next legislature (to which groups had no possibility of introducing amendments) and the annual budget bills.

6 The search was conducted using the La Vanguardia search tool (https://stories.lavanguardia.com/search)

7 They cannot affect the regulation of basic state institutions, rights, duties, and liberties of citizens, the regional statues, or the general electoral system.

8 In the 2016–2019 legislature, IU formed part of a coalition named Unidos Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea.

9 Even though we have a significant number of zeros in our dataset (36%), we did not calculate a zero-inflated model. Having many zeros in itself is no justification for using such a model (Tlhaloganyang and Thaga 2020). All the zeros in our data are real zeros, that is, in all cases, where the amendment count is zero, it is because parties decided not to introduce amendments. Differences in fit between a zero-inflated negative binomial and a negative binomial model are usually trivial so in the absence of any sound reasons for using it we preferred to avoid the conceptual complexities of the zero-inflated model (see Allison 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant num. PID2021-127542NB-I00

Notes on contributors

Anna M. Palau

Anna M. Palau is Serra Hunter Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and member of the research group Q-Dem (www.q-dem.com). Her research focuses on parliamentary behaviour, legislative politics and agenda setting. [[email protected]]

Andreu Casas

Andreu Casas is a Lecturer in Political Communication at Royal Holloway University of London, and a research affiliate in the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Centre for Social Media and Politics at New York University. His research focuses on political communication, public policy, legislative politics, and computational methods. [[email protected]]

Luz Muñoz

Luz Muñoz Márquez is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Barcelona and member of the research group Q-Dem (www.q-dem.com). Her research focuses on interest groups politics, legislative studies and Spanish politics. [[email protected]]