Legislative committees in the Turkish Parliament: performing procedural minimum or effective scrutiny?

ABSTRACT

This study examines committee influence on government bills during the AKP’s 2011–2015 majority government term in Turkey, an era characterised by democratic backsliding. It explores whether committees introduce more substantial amendments to government bills when they draw on their scrutiny powers (i.e. hearing sponsoring ministers, hearing stakeholders, forming subcommittees, secondary committee review) providing them diverse information and policy expertise. I hypothesise and test under what conditions committees use these competencies to initiate substantial changes. Overall findings based on a novel dataset indicate that legislative committees introduce more substantial amendments to government bills when they consult with sponsoring ministers and stakeholders. These findings suggest that the formal capabilities of legislative committees provide opportunities for legislators to influence government legislation even in adverse political contexts, as these mechanisms limit the government’s ability to impose its legislative agenda unilaterally. It contributes to the debates on strengthening legislatures for effective government scrutiny.

KEYWORDS:

• Legislative committees
• bill amendment
• Turkey
• government scrutiny
• democratic backsliding

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Turkey had a parliamentary system dating back to 1920 until the presidential and the general elections on 24 June 2018. Constitutional amendments transforming the parliamentary system into a presidential system were approved with a slight majority on the 16 April 2017 constitutional referendum. The system change was officially completed with the election of the first President on 24 June 2018.

2 Amendments indicate a visible type of influence on government proposals. Legislators, especially backbenchers, may also exert less visible types of influence in parliaments where the executive dominates the legislative process. Russell and Gover (2017) have shown that the power of ‘anticipated reactions’ and ‘behind-the-scenes negotiations’ at successive stages of the legislative process lead government to reflect on backbenchers’ reaction and adjust the content of bills accordingly to contain their dissent.

3 I would like to thank anonymous reviewer in a former submission for this comment.

4 This section describes the structures, procedures, and powers of the legislative committees based on the Turkish Grand National Assembly’s RoP. For more details see articles 20–49 of the RoP (in Turkish); https://anayasa.tbmm.gov.tr/1973ictuzuk.aspx

5 Except for Committees on Plan and Budget, Public Economic Enterprises, and Security and Intelligence, which always have respectively 40, 35, and 17 seats in accord with the founding laws.

6 There is no research on committee assignment in the Turkish Parliament, but generally, parties seem to pay attention to the correspondence between the occupational expertise of legislators and the policy area of committees. For instance, lawyers who have extensive knowledge regarding the body of law and law-making are generally assigned to the Committees on Constitution and Justice. Legislators with expertise in education such as teachers, academics, etc. serve on the committee dealing with educational matters. The members of the Committee on Health, Family, Employment, and Social Affairs are mostly medical doctors, pharmacists, and unionists.

7 Despite this is a significant power for committees to gather written evidence, committee reports do not report whether committees use this power or not.

8 Article 30 of the RoP indicates that committees have the right to call specialists to get their opinion, but does not clarify who would be these specialists. Though not mandatory, chairs generally call various stakeholders and academics for consultation. Sometimes, these extra-parliamentary actors follow committees’ timetables and contact them to join meetings.

9 The exclusion of budget and international agreement bills from empirical analyses is a common research strategy in notable studies related to committee review because of different rules of procedures associated with them. For instance, see Martin & Vanberg, 2005, 2011; Noble, 2020.

10 This measure is used in previous related studies, see Martin and Vanberg (2005, 2011, 2014).

11 Committees changed 93.6 per cent of the government bills that were delegated to them. They introduced substantial amendments to 85.7 per cent of them and minor amendments to 69.8 per cent of them. These figures demonstrate that committees used their power of revision vastly for inserting major and minor amendments to the majority of government bills. See Table A1 in the Appendix for descriptive statistics on government bills with no revision, minor amendments, and substantial amendments.

12 Notable studies use a threefold categorization to classify amendments with regards to their policy substantiveness (see Shephard & Cairney, 2005; Russell & Gover, 2017; Russell et al., 2016). The least substantive category -technical amendments- makes cosmetic changes and corrections with no policy effect. Middle category -consequential amendments- does not change legislation’s effect, but adds detail for interpretation. The third category -substantive amendments- change the impact of the proposed policy. Though I used a simple distinction for classifying amendments, the substantive amendments category used in this study corresponds to the third category used in these studies, since I only count amendments changing the content and scope of the bill and hence alter its impact as substantive. As I do not analyze minor amendments, I did not further categorize them as consequential or technical.

13 Negative binomial analyses conducted in STATA indicate the likelihood-ratio test of alpha rejects the null hypothesis that alpha equals zero, indicating strong evidence of overdispersion and making the negative binomial model is more appropriate than the Poisson model (Long & Freese, 2014, p. 511).

14 To note, stakeholders invited to committee meetings had heterogeneous profiles, indicating no bias towards government position.

15 In each model, I excluded one committee as the baseline category for comparison as I am interested in discerning whether there is a difference between the omitted committee and the rest of the committees.

Additional information

Funding

This study is based on the author’s PhD dissertation, which was supported by the PhD Scholarship Programme of TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey).

Notes on contributors

Eda Bektas

Eda Bektas is a lecturer in political science at Atılım University, Ankara, Turkey. Her research centres on the debates on democratisation and democratic backsliding in comparative politics with a particular focus on formal and informal institutions of legislative politics. She completed her dissertation in political science at Bilkent University and worked there a postdoctoral researcher. Previously, she was a visiting research student at the European Institute, LSE, London. She received an MA in international relations at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey and holds a BA in international relations at Bilkent University.