Do governments delay the implementation of parliamentary requests? Examining time variation in implementing legislative requests in Switzerland

Legislation is one of parliaments’ core functions. The legislature’s active influence on the legislative process primarily depends on the degree of institutional independence between government and parliament (Colomer & Negretto, 2005; Shugart & Carey, 1992). In contrast to parliamentary systems with a strong entanglement of powers, systems with a strong separation of powers have legislatures with an active and independent position. How the government deals with parliamentary requests, especially in these systems, and what factors influence the government’s responsiveness are questions of particular democratic-theoretical and practical interest, since parliamentary instruments are used as a means of both legislating and monitoring the executive. Thus, parliamentary requests are central instruments that parliaments use to fulfil their legislative and control functions (Mattson, 1995). However, arguably, governments increasingly dominate this relationship and only implement parliamentary requests if they want to (Graf, 2014: 829). In parliamentary systems specifically, there is a broad scholarly consensus that the government controls the agenda, while the parliament’s role is limited to accepting or rejecting proposals (Tsebelis, 2009). Nevertheless, the reality seems to be more complex even in presidential systems where, according to Tsebelis (1995: 325), “the legislature makes the proposals and the executive (the president) signs or vetoes them”. Thus, the parliaments’ legislative agenda-setting power has usually and very generally been considered to be rather weak, which, in turn, nourishes and consolidates the “decline of parliament” thesis.

This paper, which aims at contributing to the literature on parliaments’ legislative agenda-setting and control powers and the associated executive–legislative relations, takes this as its starting point. However, unlike previous research that mostly focuses on institutional factors to distinguish between strong and weak governments and parliaments (see, for example, Bernauer & Vatter, 2019; Döring 2001; Fish, 2006; Mattson, 1995; Rasch & Tsebelis, 2011; Siaroff, 2003), this paper emphasizes the relevance of the procedural level. We argue that in order to assess the relative power of the executive and the legislative bodies, we should go beyond formal rules and settings and consider specifically whether and to what degree the executive is able to control the legislation process in practice. One central moment is when the government reacts to parliamentary requests and implements them. Thus, our paper investigates different mechanisms explaining lengthy or speedy implementation processes. More precisely, we seek to explain time variation in implementing parliamentary requests.

We combine the literature on executive–legislative relations with findings from research on implementation and, specifically, on bureaucratic rule-making in the USA, to deduce different hypotheses about why governments do not implement parliamentary requests in due time. These mechanisms are related to procedural, rather than to institutional factors, namely: opposition from within the government (i.e. the government does not want to implement), inability to implement (i.e. the government cannot do so), or opposition from within the parliament (i.e. the government should not implement). In view of these three mechanisms, we also argue that neglecting to implement may not necessarily be an indicator of a strong government (i.e. an executive that only implements parliamentary demands if it wants to). Rather, different reasons may lead to this outcome. Hence, insights into the factors that explain the time variation in implementing parliamentary requests improve our understanding of the relationship between the executive and the legislative.

Empirically, we focus on the Swiss case and provide new insights into the factors that determine how and, particularly, how fast the government reacts to parliamentary (procedural) requests. Our central variable of interest is implementation time defined as the time between the moment the parliament approves a parliamentary request (and thus mandates the Federal Council to deal with that request) and the moment the parliament abandons it (i.e. considers the request fulfilled). We rely on official data (CUBE data set, Parliamentary Control of the Administration, 2018) that enables us to analyse the full sample of 2233 motions and postulates approved between the parliament’s 2003 winter session and its 2018 spring session. The focus on many requests within a single country is well in keeping with our interest in procedural factors and allows us to keep the institutional setting constant.

The contribution of our study is twofold:

On the one hand, it provides new insights into the Swiss case, which is particularly interesting for analysing the relative power of the parliament and the government in the legislative policy-making process. Switzerland stands out for its unusual system of executive–legislative relations, which combines elements from both parliamentary and presidential systems (Schwarz et al., 2011; Vatter & Wirz, 2015). Just like in presidential systems, the Swiss parliament, i.e. the Federal Assembly, enjoys a relatively independent position vis-à-vis the government (Graf et al., 2014), i.e. the Federal Council. This is because members of the government are not allowed to hold seats in the parliament (Lüthi, 2007) and the government cannot be dissolved through a vote of no confidence (Vatter, 2020). Moreover, the Swiss political system grants parliamentarians the right to initiate legislation without imposing numerical, temporal, technical, or content-related restrictions (Flick Witzig & Bernauer, 2018; Mattson, 1995; Siaroff, 2003; Vatter, 2020). Thus, compared to their counterparts in other countries, Swiss parliamentarians are hardly constrained in their right to initiate a legislative process. However, if a Swiss member of parliament (MP) exercises his/her right to initiate legislation in Switzerland, this does not automatically curtail the executive’s potential to influence the legislative outcome. Rather, legislative rules concerning parliamentary requests open different windows of opportunity for governments to influence the following legislative process. Indeed, the Swiss government has repeatedly been accused of exerting its influence by delaying parliamentary requests (see, for example, Graf, 1991; Political Institutions Committee (PIC-N), 2007). Nevertheless, even though the Swiss government plays a pivotal role in shaping executive–legislative relations and, consequently, in shaping and maintaining democracy, to date, we still know little about whether and why the Swiss government really delays the implementation of parliamentary requests. This paper aims at filling this gap theoretically and empirically.

On the other hand, the present study and its results are also relevant beyond the Swiss case. First, it departs from the fact that in parliamentary systems, legislatures tend to be considered particularly weak. While in theory, “the legislature notionally controls the executive, the relationship often in practice works the other way around” (Russel and Cowley, 2016: 121). Accordingly, in many parliamentary systems the government effectively initiates legislation, while the legislature merely agrees to the executive’s legislative initiatives. Thus, different studies emphasize the “parliamentary decline thesis” and, in particular, the powerlessness of the legislature in the Westminster systems (King & Crewe, 2013; Kreppel, 2014). Knill and Tosun (2012: 139) sum up existing research: “Despite the name ‘parliamentary democracy’, the parliament plays only a limited role in decision-making in the British Westminster model”. Our article aims to provide an answer to the relevant question of what could happen if the legislature actually exercised its right to initiate legislation in practice. Using Switzerland as a test case enables us to examine the relationship between the executive and the legislative branches in a context of multipartism, coalition government, and heterogeneous cultures, which is typical of most European countries. Such analyses make it possible to draw conclusions about European countries looking for alternatives to the prevailing parliamentary system with weak legislatures, which has come under increasing criticism (see Sciarini et al., 2021).

Second, we focus on the mechanisms explaining governments’ “behaviour” when they implement parliamentary requests. We expect that these mechanisms may also be relevant to other situations in which governments and their administrations implement legislative decisions. Some examples are bureaucratic rule-making (Bolton et al., 2016; Potter, 2017) and also subnational or supranational multilevel governance, e.g. the implementation of EU directives (Borghetto & Franchino, 2010; König & Luetgert, 2009). While both the political systems and the stages of policy making of these examples vary, all of them are characterized by an implementing body that has more or less leeway and, relatedly, power in the implementation process. The Swiss case may be particularly informative to the investigation of the mechanisms that shape these relationships because it is an intermediary case on the parliamentary strength continuum, incorporating both parliamentary and presidential features (Sciarini et al., 2021).¹

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: The next section seeks to contextualize our case by taking a closer look at the main instruments that the Swiss parliament can use to initiate a legislative process. In “Reasons for Delaying Parliamentary Legislative Requests: Theoretical Approach and Hypotheses” section, we discuss the main theoretical assumptions about how and why the government may delay parliamentary requests. Given the scarcity of scientific attention to these questions, we develop our theoretical framework by combining discourses and evidence from parliamentary research with key findings from implementation research and then advance our main hypotheses. The “Methodology” section focuses on our methodological approach and the operationalization of our variables. We present and discuss the findings of our statistical analysis in the “Empirical Results” section. The paper concludes with a brief summary of our main findings and a discussion of their implications.

From an international perspective, the Swiss political system stands out for its institutionalization of direct democratic instruments, its decentralized federalism, and its unique system of proportional power-sharing within and between the executive and the legislative body (Linder, 2007; Linder & Mueller, 2021). According to these institutional features of power-sharing, many different political actors, including the government and the parliament but also the people and the cantons, can provide the impetus for legislative regulations in Switzerland. While all these actors have been using their right to initiate legislation, to date, the large majority of bills is initiated and drafted by the government, i.e. the Federal Council (Vatter, 2018). Indeed, as Lüthi (2007, 140) puts it, the Swiss parliament’s involvement in the political decision-making process often occurs at a relatively late stage. Accordingly, the parliament’s legislative agenda-setting power has usually been considered to be rather weak (see, for example, Brüschweiler & Vatter, 2018; Lüthi, 2007; Schwarz et al., 2011; Vatter, 2020). However, more recent studies indicate that MPs have increasingly been making use of instruments that allow them to set the legislative agenda themselves (see, for example, Brüschweiler & Vatter, 2018; Jaquet et al., 2019), i.e. to use their positive agenda-setting power (Jenkins et al., 2016).

To do so, MPs have different instruments at their disposal.² We focus on the two instruments that oblige the government (i.e. in a binding way) to get active and implement the parliament’s requests. The so-called motions are the first such instrument. Through a motion, the parliament forces the government to submit a bill to the parliament and/or to take a certain action (Article 120(1) ParlA).³Postulates are a second, weaker instrument at parliamentarians’ disposal. Postulates mandate the Federal Council to examine and report whether a bill and/or another measure should or should not be introduced.

Motions’ and postulates’ process requirements are generally the same, with some exceptions: Both types of parliamentary requests can be submitted by a parliamentarian committee, but they can also be presented by a single council member or a parliamentary group. While a motion is only issued and transferred to the Federal Council if approved by both chambers of the parliament, postulates only need to be approved by the parliament chamber in which they have been submitted. It should be noted that in many cases, parliamentary requests are tacitly approved—the parliament does not explicitly vote on them. In fact, an explicit vote is only held if an item of business is opposed by at least one member of the National Council, i.e. the lower chamber, or by the government which, for its part, issues its acceptance or rejection in the run-up to the parliament’s decision. Additionally, a vote may be held if a proposal has been submitted by a parliamentary committee and a minority of this parliamentary committee opposes its approval.

Once the parliament approves the motion, the government implements it and, if it is fulfilled, requests its abandonment.⁴ The parliament then votes on the request. The abandonment of a postulate only requires the consent of one chamber—the chamber that has approved it—while motions need to be abandoned by both chambers (Article 124(5) ParlA). With motions, “[i]f a request for abandonment is rejected by both chambers, the government must fulfil the request contained in the motion within one year or within the period fixed by the two chambers on rejecting the request” (Article 122(5) ParlA).⁵

In light of our research question, it is important to note that this deadline only applies to motions for which the government has already issued an abandonment request. The Parliament Act does not, however, generally determine a formal time limit within which the government must implement a motion or a postulate after its approval. The only reference to a time limit in the Parliament Act indicates that the executive has to report on motions and postulates still pending two years after the parliament has approved them. In these reports, the government has to explain what it has already done to fulfil the parliamentary request as well as any additional plans to further deal with its fulfilment.

Motions and postulates do not generally curtail the Federal Council’s potential influence on the legislative process. The parliamentarian political institutions committee has advanced an important critique: that the executive influences the law-making process through motions and postulates by delaying parliamentary requests. Such implementation delays, i.e. a long period between the parliament’s adoption of the request and the request’s abandonment, are possible due to the lack of formal time frames for the implementation of motions and postulates. In the next section, we discuss potential theoretical grounds for this assumption.

As the introduction mentioned, the time variation in the implementation of parliamentary requests has hardly ever been empirically addressed. Accordingly, this topic also lacks theoretical foundations. However, this gap can be filled by combining the general findings of the studies on executive–legislative relations and on the institutional dimensions of the decision-making process with findings from implementation research. The latter seems to be particularly appropriate for analysing governments’ executive function, which is inherently linked to bureaucratic politics.

We depart from theoretical approaches that conceptualize the dimensions and determinants of (non-)compliance with legislative directives, which have been prominent in the field of multilevel implementation research (see, for example, Börzel, 2001; Chayes & Handler Chayes, 1993; Falkner et al., 2005; Simmons, 2002). More precisely and in accordance with Falkner et al. (2005), we understand non-implementation or delayed implementation as subforms of non-compliance, which can emanate from an (unintentional) inability to implement parliamentary requests or intentional opposition to implementation. In the latter case, opposition to implementation can emerge from within the Federal Council itself, but also from other political actors which, in turn, might restrain the Federal Council’s options of accurately implementing requests. We argue that the non-implementation or the delayed implementation of parliamentary requests by the Federal Council can result from the facts that the Federal Council (a) cannot accurately implement requests (inability), (b) shall not accurately implement requests (opposition from outside the Federal Council), or (c) simply does not want to accurately implement requests (opposition from within the Federal Council). Similar mechanisms—especially the distinction between capacity-related and political reasons for implementation delays—have been proposed by studies on bureaucratic rule-making in the USA (Bolton et al., 2016; Potter, 2017). We also rely on them to specify our theoretical expectations. In what follows, we will discuss some potential determinants of delayed implementation or non-implementation resulting from these three situations more closely.

We test our hypotheses empirically based on the CUBE data set (Parliamentary Control of the Administration, 2018). This database was compiled by the Parliamentary Control of the Administration (PCA), the evaluation service of the Federal Assembly. The information contained therein is mainly taken from the database of parliamentary proceedings, Curia Vista,¹² and from the Federal Council’s yearly reports on motions and postulates.

The CUBE database represents a systematic collection of all motions and postulates that were approved between the parliament’s 2003 winter session and its 2018 spring session. As Table 1 shows, a total of 2233 items of business were approved during this period. About 70% of them were abandoned by the end of the 2018 spring session. The remaining parliamentary requests were still pending at that time.

Our main variable of interest (i.e. our main dependent variable) is the duration of these observations’ implementation calculated as the number of days between their approval and their abandonment. As we do not know the date of abandonment of requests that are still pending, our data are right censored. We use survival analysis in order to account for this data structure and still include these most recent cases (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones, 1997, 2004; Golub, 2007). Hence, we model implementation duration as a parliamentary request’s “survival time”, i.e. until it is abandoned by the parliament. A dummy variable thereby measures whether a legislative request has actually been abandoned—whether the target event has happened—or not. In a first empirical step, we present nonparametric survival curves that plot bivariate patterns of the probability that an item of business has not been abandoned after a certain duration.¹³ We then proceed with estimating Cox proportional hazards models that include our explanatory variables. In both empirical steps, we exclude motions and postulates (pending or abandoned) with extra-long implementation times (> 2200 days, N = 113). This decision obeys expert assessments that such overly long implementations are not only very rare, but should also be considered outliers that often hinge on other institutional factors and peculiarities not discussed here.

Following our hypotheses, we focus on six explanatory variables. First, to measure the motion- and postulate-related workload of the responsible Federal Office’s, we constructed a dummy variable which takes the value of 1 if the responsible Federal Office was in charge of at least 90 items of business during the investigated period, i.e. between the parliament’s 2003 winter session and its 2018 spring session. The limit of 90 items of business is justified by empirical distribution criteria—the group of federal offices with 90 and more requests empirically stands out rather clearly from those with a (often much) smaller workload (see Fig. 5 in “Appendix”). Measuring the workload of a Federal Office is not self-evident. Yet, we argue that considering the distribution of parliamentary requests in the period under investigation and across the different Federal Offices is a simple but reliable approximation.¹⁴ There is no reason to believe that this general distribution should substantially vary over time. Moreover, we do not assume that the exact number of requests is related to the implementation time in a linear way but, rather, expect that there are general differences between those with many items of business to handle and their less busy counterparts. Therefore, we use a dummy specification (see Fig. 8a in “Appendix” for an alternative metric specification leading to the same result). The second explanatory variable is a dummy variable capturing whether the head of the responsible ministry changed during the implementation of the specific item of business.¹⁵ Third, in order to account for potential time variation related to the type of the parliamentary request, we use a dummy variable that differentiates between motions and postulates.

To capture opposition within the parliament, we first identified whether the parliament had voted on the approval of a specific item of business. If so, we calculated the ratio between the number of MP’s voting in favour and the number of MP’s voting against the item’s approval by calculating the difference between the “yes” and the “no” votes and dividing it by the total number of votes. Items of business that had been tacitly approved received a value of 1 (i.e. no opposition). Thus, our opposition indicator ranges between 0 and 1, whereby lower numbers imply a smaller majority supporting the item. In contrast, high values indicate that a broad, multiparty coalition (more or less explicitly) supported the parliamentary request.

Moreover, we want to measure an item’s potential for causing political controversy, which, however, is not an easy task. Indeed, we are not able to assess the level of controversy based on a parliamentary request’s content. Yet, in light of the recent political discussion in Switzerland, arguably the most heated debates usually emerge around reforms dealing with social policy provisions as well as migration-related policies. This is also reflected in the fact that those topics were most frequently subjects of optional referendums and initiatives. Given that the ministries in Switzerland are responsible for specific issue areas, we assume that ministries like the FDHA (Federal Department of Home Affairs), which is responsible for social security measures, among other things, or the FDJP (Federal Department of Justice and Police), which is responsible for (im-)migration policies, have to deal with more contested and complex issues than other ministries.¹⁶ In contrast, we expect that items that fall under the FDFA’s (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs) responsibility are much less contested since the domain of foreign policies traditionally belongs to the government’s exclusive realm. Accordingly, foreign policy stands outside the usual party conflicts and other domestic disputes (Goetschel, 2014; Jaquet et al., 2019). Since diplomacy is responsible for foreign policy, the parliament is more reserved in this policy area than in domestic policy and the government can be expected to implement the comparatively few parliamentary requests more quickly. Based on these assumptions, we argue that ministry responsibility may constitute a crude proxy for thematic focus and, thus, for an item’s potential complexity and controversial nature. Accordingly, our analyses use dummy variables indicating the ministry that has been assigned responsibility for a particular item of business.¹⁷

Our last explanatory variable has to do with the opposition an item of business might meet with within the executive. We include a variable that measures whether the government proposed the acceptance, the partial acceptance, or the rejection of a motion or a postulate in the run-up to its approval in parliament.

Besides our crucial explanatory variables, our regression analyses control for two additional factors that may influence implementation delays. First, in order to account for potential time effects, we integrate a variable that defines the legislative term. On the one hand, this allows us to control for systematic variation in implementation time over time, namely that items that have been submitted more recently have a systematically higher probability of exhibiting short implementation times and/or not being abandoned yet. Moreover, this variable may also capture changes in the political context, namely differing political dynamics, e.g. due to varying composition of the parliament or varying degrees of polarization. Furthermore, we account for the fact that some items of business cannot be considered independent from each other. In fact, it is not unusual for MP’s to join forces and individually submit a motion or a postulate with a similar or even identical content. This is done to put more emphasis on a specific topic. We control for this lack of independence by including a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if there is an item with a similar or identical content.¹⁸

With this paper, we seek to contribute to the literature on parliaments’ legislative agenda-setting power and the associated executive–legislative relations by investigating whether and how the government may influence parliamentary legislative agenda setting. More precisely, we focused on the Swiss case and asked how the time variation in the implementation of parliamentary requests can be explained. We relied on a novel database including a systematic collection of all motions and postulates that have been approved between the parliament’s 2003 winter session and its 2018 spring session. The most important findings can be summarized as follows.

Second, when investigating the latter, it is obvious that time variation in implementing parliamentary requests is associated with a range of different factors. More precisely, the implementation of parliamentary requests takes significantly longer if the responsible Federal Office is burdened with many requests, if the request is likely to cover a complex or controversial issue, and if the head of the responsible ministry changes during the implementation process. Conversely, we did not find evidence for our assumption about the differences across request types. Likewise, opposition from within the parliament does not seem to be associated with the length of an item’s implementation period, nor do we find a statistically consistent relationship between the government’s position on a legislative request and the latter’s implementation time.

In terms of policy implications, our results largely confirm the findings of existing implementation research—effective implementation is driven by resource-related and structural conditions. In accordance with prior research pointing to the importance of adequate administrative structures and sufficient management resources (Sager, 2007; Simmons, 2002), we conclude that a high workload may lead to delays in the processing and implementation of parliamentary requests. Moreover, Sabatier and Mazmanian (1980) describe a high degree of stability in framework conditions as one of six prerequisites for high implementation success. Our findings imply that changes of the head of a ministry (but also when parliamentary requests move from one ministry to another) disrupt this stability and complicate implementation, as they tie resources up and entail a loss of expertise. It needs to be mentioned that our findings stem from a highly stable political context. For example, there has not been a single change in the party–political composition of the Swiss collegial government between 1959 and 2003, and the same four parties that gained representation in 1960 were still represented in the executive in 2020. Accordingly, the combination of a broad-based multiparty government and strong direct democracy has resulted in the absence of a "classic" parliamentary opposition in Switzerland (Church & Vatter, 2009). If changes in government and administrative reorganization are important drivers of implementation delays in a context like Switzerland, it seems relevant to more specifically investigate these factors, especially in political systems characterized by lower levels of stability.

A second implication is that a lengthy implementation of parliamentary requests does not primarily result from hampered opportunities or the government’s lack of will to implement parliamentary demands. Put differently, there is no support for the idea that the government “shall not” or “does not want to” implement faster. Rather, long implementation periods are mostly related to the fact that the government “cannot” implement faster (the inability argument), i.e. to factors such as highly busy Federal Offices or complex and controversial issues, while delays may be less significantly related to the government taking advantage of its role as a gate keeper.

Nevertheless, besides the substantial implications discussed above, we argue that our study also provides important insights for policy analysis in general and into the role of governments in implementing legislative requests more specifically. Switzerland still allows us to investigate the case of an independent and active legislature in a non-parliamentary but European multiparty system. Our study thereby contributes to the current "parliamentary decline thesis” in parliamentary systems of government (Kreppel, 2014) and offers a possible answer to the question of what could happen in these systems if the legislature and its members played a more powerful role in initiating legislation.

More conceptually, our analysis demonstrates that focusing on the procedural dimension can provide new empirical and theoretical insights into the executive–legislative relationship. Empirically, our study suggests that previous research may have overestimated the government’s agenda-setting power, mainly because structural and resource aspects limit governments’ control over the implementation of parliament’s requests. Theoretically, we are able to show that the combination of parliamentary research and implementation studies enables us to formulate different mechanisms that may affect the executive–legislative relationship in practice. Specifically, the comparison with bureaucratic rule-making in the USA (Bolton et al., 2016; Potter, 2017) or multilevel governance, e.g. in the European Union (Borghetto & Franchino, 2010; König & Luetgert, 2009), demonstrates that different elements of policy making in different political settings can be theoretically and conceptually analysed by relying on very similar mechanisms. Making use of these similarities may be a fruitful path for further research; for example, in efforts to generate more generalized knowledge about the conditions under which “sincere” or “strategic delay” are likely to occur, namely, whether any systematic patterns contingent on the political system or the specific stage of rule-making can be identified.