Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Systems: Policy-Making and Legislative Processes

✍ Scribed by Patrícia Calca

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 195
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Analysing the conditions under which governments are more likely to present an executive law or a government bill, this book addresses a central aspect of the decision-making process of public policies. Drafting legislation is an important action to achieve specific policy goals, and the path chosen for this process is part of governmental strategy. This book presents a new theoretical explanation of how executives wield legislative power, based in a formal model. The model is tested using new data from Portugal. It shows that in political systems where one of the political actors has veto powers which can easily be overridden, the type of parliamentary majority is the main consideration for the government's choice of legislative instrument. More specifically, when a government does not have the majority in parliament it is more likely to propose an executive law, and contrary, when a government has a majority in parliament, it is more likely to propose a government bill.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Introduction
2 Executive-Legislative Relations and Legislative Process
2.1 Political Institutions and Procedures
2.1.1 Institutional Procedures
2.2 Legislative Studies and Bargaining Models
2.3 Executive-Legislative Relations
2.4 Chapter Final Remarks
3 A Formal Model of Executive Law-Making
3.1 A Formal Model of Executive Law-Making: The Setup
3.2 Solving Model 1: Paths
3.3 Solving Model 2: Scenarios
3.4 Chapter Final Remarks
4 Characterisation of the Portuguese Case
4.1 A Starting Point: The Constitution of 1976
4.2 Institutional and Political Bodies
4.3 Law-Making in Portugal
4.4 Portugal: An Outlook
4.5 Chapter Final Remarks
5 The Construction of the Database
5.1 The Crafting of a Database
5.2 From Conceptualisation to Measurement
5.2.1 Dependent, Independent and Control Variables
5.3 Descriptive Statistics of the Database
5.4 Chapter Final Remarks
6 Empirical Implications of the Formal Model
6.1 Testing the Theoretical Predictions of the Model
6.2 Chapter Final Remarks
7 Conclusions: Executive-Legislative Relations and Policy-Making
Appendix A: Interview Transcription
A.1 Interview to Francisco Pinto Balsemão
Appendix B: Utility Functions per Actor
B.1 General Game Tree and Actors' Utilities
B.2 Solving Utility Functions per Actor (Backwards Induction Order)
Glossary
References
Index