Executive-Legislative Relations in Parliamentary Systems

This second chapter comprises theories and concepts that are relevant for the framing of this book. More specifically, I address theoretical approaches related to executive-legislative relations as well as important concepts like representative democracy and political representation. Thus, the main thread of this chapter is related to institutional dynamics that are engaged by institutional political actors within the legislative-executive stage. Not surprisingly, this legislative perspective necessarily connects to policy production and respective political responsiveness, not separating the processual issues that glue together all the previous concepts.

In this chapter I present a procedural model of legislative behaviour. With this model, I explain governments’ choice of legislative path (between an executive law or a government bill) taking into consideration the strategic aspects of the proposal itself. Moreover, this governmental decision will not be made in isolation but rather consider other institutional actors such as the parliament and the president. Consequently, I present four distinct scenarios within which the strategic choice of the government for one or the other legislative instrument, as the type law, can be explained. Thus, I deduce four hypotheses concerning each of the scenarios. When we have a weak and a minority government scenario, the government will more likely propose an executive law. When we have a majority and a strong government scenario, the government will more likely propose a government bill.

This is the chapter where I introduce the Portuguese case. Here, I offer a broader characterisation of the country’s political system, mainly focusing on organisational aspects of the relationship between parliament and government, as this is relevant to the testing of my formal model. Not only does this chapter set the tone for the database construction and respective empirics, but it also addresses other points like the constitutional evolution of the country, its parliamentary or semi-presidential system setting, and the main political actors’ legislative powers. All these elements are relevant for the strategic considerations raised in this book.

This chapter addresses the dataset construction. Covering a period of about 27 years (1982-2009), this dataset was coded from the theoretic perspective previously presented. The operationalisation and respective coding of each of the variables also implied several recombinations of initially coded variables to create variables able to mimic the four scenarios used to solve the formal model. This database is a relevant contribution presented in this book.

In this chapter, I offer an empirical analysis of the formal model using a binomial logistic regression. The four hypotheses deduced from the formal model are confirmed empirically with data from Portugal. The empirical test of the model shows that governments will more likely enact an executive law when they are minority or weak governments, and a government bill when they are majority or strong governments. I also show that in the choice of a legislative instrument, the president has little influence, what does not mean that the president will not have other ways to influence public policies. But, the Portuguese president is, nevertheless, a non-executive actor.

This final chapter concludes the book that started with the question: Under which conditions is a government more likely to present an executive law or a government bill? Here, I underline the approach used in the book that combines several branches of literature, a theory developed in the formal model, the choice and characterisation of the Portuguese case, the data coding and respective empirical testing of the theory. My findings reinforce the notion that in political systems where one of the political actors has veto power that can be overridden, what matters for government choice of legislative instrument, and consequently legislative path, is the majority in parliament. My expectations were confirmed, as when a government does not have a majority in parliament and/or does not have the president on its side (minority and weak government scenarios) it is more likely to propose an executive law. The government will more likely propose a government bill when it has a majority in parliament and/or the president is aligned with it (majority and strong government scenarios).