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 policymaking 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 at the beginning of a term ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner 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.

Xiao Lu

Assistant Professor

My research interests include political methodology, party politics, coalition politics, legislative politics and European politics.