Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

Abstract

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

Circumventing coalition oversight in multiparty governments: Bill referral to parliamentary committees in the Finnish Eduskunta

“…If political parties are policy-oriented and rational (Müller and Strøm, 1999; Strøm, 1990), it is unreasonable to assume that coalition parties would simply accept all monitoring activities that are awaiting in the policy-making process without attempting to preempt or avoid them. Although existing research shows that they can engage in signaling activities to offset potential electoral costs of making policy concessions (Eichorst and Lin, 2019; Martin and Vanberg, 2008, 2011; Sagarzazu and Klüver, 2017) or strategically time bill initiations to minimize partner scrutiny (König et al Forthcoming), future research is needed to further explore other possible ways with which ministerial parties could secure their policy interests and maintain their autonomy in the multiparty policy-making process.…”

“…5One such strategy ministers can employ is delaying their bill initiations when anticipating partner scrutiny, as König et al (Forthcoming) recently show in an exceptional study.…”

Government dominance and the role of opposition in parliamentary democracies

“…On the contrary, when the coalition partner controls the chair of the reviewing committee, the likelihood of opposition support rather motivates the partner chair to hinder amendment proposals; otherwise, the partner chair risks providing reputation gains for the opposition and suffering costs from coalition tensions. In this case, the ministerial office‐holder may also learn the partner's competitive type, which can exacerbate the principal‐agent problems within coalition governments (König et al., 2022).…”

“…99Furthermore, the office‐holding ministerial party may learn about the competitive type of her partner party through the partner's challenges to government bills in parliament (König et al., 2022). …”

“…2626Similar to König et al. (2022), distinguishing between radical and moderate bills allows to identify whether the minister is a cooperative or competitive type, the latter pursuing a vote‐maximizing strategy at the expense of the coalition partner.…”