Restrictive Legislative Procedures, Party Bargaining and Political Performance in Advanced Industrial Democracies

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9321089 Huber This investigation examines the impact of parliamentary procedures on policy-making processes in advanced industrial democracies. The project focuses in particular on procedures that restrict the opportunities for elected representatives to shape final policy outcomes through the amendment process. Such procedures include confidence votes, delegated legislation, package votes, and guillotines (or timetable procedures). One significant feature of the study is that it is genuinely comparative. This is important because although existing theories of parliamentary procedures yield predictions that should be empirically testable across countries, previous empirical research focuses almost exclusively on the U.S. Congress. Consequently, it is difficult for scholars to defend claims about the comparative properties of legislative rules and procedures, or to point to general theories that can guide the choice of particular institutional arrangements. A second significant feature is that the study explores linkages between parliamentary procedures and two important aspects of political performance: the nature of policy outcomes and levels of cabinet stability. With respect to policy outcomes, the research will focus in particular on explaining how various institutional structures influence the ability of politicians to adopt new policies (i.e., move away from the status quo), and on explaining whether particular institutional structures encourage policy outcomes that are systematically moderate or systematically extreme relative to the preferences of the median member of the legislature. By focusing on legislative rules and political performance in a genuinely comparative context, the study will clarify choices that politicians make in designing their rules of parliamentary procedure. This final point is especially relevant for individuals in nascent democracies ho for the first time must design procedures that will enable legislatures to pla y more than a symbolic role in the policy-making process. ***