Legislative success in open sky congresses: weak gatekeeping prerogatives and the loss of majority support

ABSTRACT

In legislatures with weak gatekeeping institutions and constrained plenary time, scheduling rules and majority requirements explain inter-party differences in the consideration and approval of law initiatives. In this paper a mixture survival model is used to analyse legislative success in a legislature with very weak gatekeeping prerogatives, the House of Representatives of Uruguay. Evidence is provided that the loss of majority support depletes plenary time more rapidly and yields an ideological drift that benefits the median voter of the House. The results inform recent debates on the endogenous formation of a plenary schedule in open sky legislatures.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative success
• cartel theory
• gatekeeping
• plenary schedule

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eduardo Alemán, David Altman, Hanna Birnir, Marcelo Escolar, Fernando Guarnieri, Fernando Limongi, and Jonathan Rodden for comments and suggestions.

Note on authors

Ernesto Calvo is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Government and Politics (GVPT), University of Maryland, College Park, USA, email: [email protected]

Daniel Chasquetti is Professor in the Political Science Institute of the Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay, email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Notes

1. See Krehbiel (1998), Cox and McCubbins (2005) and Rohde (1991). For the particular cases of Latin America, see Alemán (2006) for a description of agenda setting rules in Latin America. See Crisp and Driscoll (2012) for a discussion of voting procedures and Saiegh (2011) for a general comparative analysis of legislative success under different partisan contexts.

2. Committees may draft multiple minority reports. Bills with majority and multiple minority reports will be considered in order until one of the versions is approved, beginning with the majority report proposal.

3. The double-simultaneous vote formula is a type of apparentement rule, where different factions of a party present their own sub-lists of candidates. On election day, voters cast a preference for one of the sub-lists, with seat shares being allocating in proportion to the total party votes (sum of all sub-lists) and the party candidates being selected as a function of the shares of votes for each of the sub-lists. There is wide consensus among scholars that the double-simultaneous vote explains the high level of within-party factionalism in the Uruguayan Congress.

4. This coalition collapsed in 2002 and from then until the end of the term, President Batlle had the sole support of his minority party (Chasquetti, 2013).

5. The rate of overall success (final approval by Congress) is also lower for members of the House, 24 per cent, compared with members of the Senate, 27 per cent.

6. Descriptive information shows that only 2.6 per cent of initiatives approved in the House bypassed the committee gates and only 16 per cent of reported bills fail on the plenary floor. Consequently, descriptive data on committee success is very similar to overall success rates for the House.

7. Failure being defined as either voted down on the plenary floor or dying without being considered by committee or plenary members.