Francesco ZucchiniUniversità di Milano

Paper prepared for SISP Venezia 2010

Recent studies of the legislative process contain a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda-setting powers, and these hypotheses lead scholars to identify which conflicts (and consequently which actors) are of fundamental importance in explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation (Tsebelis 2002, Huber and Shipan 2003, Cox & McCubbins 2005.). The unchallenged opinion about the crucial importance of the agenda setting power in explaining the lawmaking has not yet induced to deepen the origins of the specific agenda setting power configuration in the different countries. ==>

Government alternation and legislative agenda setting.*

Research Question

• Why in some parliamentary democracy the Cabinet has an undisputed leading role in the law making whilst in others the Parliament still plays effectively the role of co-protagonist?

General hypothesis• In pivotal party systems with rare and limited

government alternation it is much more difficult any strengthening of the government vis-vis the Parliament. One factor prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the Cabinet in these circumstances: lack of opportunities of and expectations for a large and controversial policy change.

More preciselyH1) a high level of government alternation

strengthens de facto the agenda-setting power of the government. Government alternation is a necessary and sufficient condition for a less frequent use of the amendment power from the parliament (the “closed rule”).

H2) Government alternation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of new rules that increase formally and permanently the agenda setting power of the government . An increase of the government ideological homogeneity is the other necessary condition.

The model (1) • Parliament whose median voter is M • Government composed at least of two political players who are

disposed at the opposite sides of the left-right ideological spectrum (VPL and VPR), in a one-dimensional space.

• The government decides to promote the policy change and the Parliament decides the procedure. Inside the government we can assume without lack of generality that the closest actor to the present status quo, q, is also the first promoter of the change, while the farthest one is only a veto player.

The model (2)

• The options of the Parliament are grouped into three categories: • a) Adopting a rule granting amendment powers to the

parliamentary floor: procedure r = o. The government chooses a policy and a parliamentary majority adopts it under open rule. The final policy outcome coincides with the ideal point of M, the parliamentary median voter position m.

• b) Adopting a rule preventing a government agreement from being amended by the floor: procedure r = c . Once the bill is proposed, the majority of the parliament decides to give up the right to amend. The government chooses a policy and a parliamentary majority adopts it under “closed rule. The final outcome is g. As the government is supposed to know the preferences of the parliament, the closed rule allows the government to select and propose the policy that it prefers the most and that will be accepted by the parliament.

• c) Changing the rules: procedure r=n. Parliament before dealing with the bill proposed by the Government creates a new rule that allows the government to propose the bill by a take-it-or leave-it option at the onset of the legislative process. This new rule deprives quasi- permanently the Parliament of its power to amend the government proposal.

The model (4)The three moves at M’s disposal imply different decision costs cr. The procedures that leave more scope to debate, like open rule (o), are by far

more vulnerable to a parliamentary conflict sparked off by opposition parties. They can be more costly for government parties and for the median voter in Parliament than the closed rule (c) is. Changing the rules can be very costly as well. However this price is overwhelmingly compensated by the long run of benefits of the reform: once the new rule is approved the parliament does not have to examine anymore every single government bill in order to decide which procedure to adopt.

Therefore, the decision costs vary according to the procedure r, the actors, the position of the status quo q and the length of the time horizon. The open rule is very costly for the median voter M in the Parliament (and the government actors) when the status quo is very controversial, that is, when the opposition strongly disapproves of the change.

The change of the rules is costly regardless of where the status quo policy is located, but when the new rules are in force they can be extremely convenient for the parliamentary majority. According to a cautious evaluation I can consider the decision cost of changing the rules equal to the decision cost of the closed rule.

Therefore, for M, we assume that in the long run:

cc (cost of closed rule) = cn (cost of new rule)= 0 ;

co (cost of open rule) = f (q, Op, VPL, VPR)

The model (4)• An informal introduction to the implications of this simple

game can be illustrated by a spatial representation of the legislative change in case of an oversized government. The cost of the procedure o (co) can be represented spatially as an additional distance c from the final policy outcome m. The distance is “added” on the left of m if I consider a leftist status quo q when the crucial VP is VPL. Without any loose of generality I will consider the outcomes only when q < VPL. They are mirrored when q> VPR. When VPLq VPR the solution of the game is trivially q.

( ) ( )if VPL q Op or VPL Op q Oversized government(in bold the final outcome)

( ) ( )if VPL q Op or VPL Op q Oversized government(in bold the final outcome)

In Fig. 2a, the status quo q is outside the government's Pareto set, namely the line connecting VPL and VPR. Both the government actors could easily agree to change it. However, VPL will not propose any bill, lest the parliament (m) should choose an open rule leading to m+co as the final policy outcome. This result would be much worse for VPL than the initial status quo q.

( ) ( )if VPL q Op or VPL Op q Oversized government(in bold the final outcome)

The policy change and the adoption of a closed rule becomes possible in the scenario of Fig. 2b.In this case, the status quo q is far from VPL and near enough to Op to make it convenient for VPL to propose g. Given the cost co of the open rule, the parliament will find it marginally better to adopt such a proposal with a closed rule rather than allow amendments by adopting an open rule.

( ) ( )if VPL q Op or VPL Op q Oversized government(in bold the final outcome)

Figure 2c presents a similar scenario to that of Fig. 2b, but here VPL is much closer to M. In this case the Parliament is indifferent between the adoption of a closed rule and the introduction of a new rule that allows the government to propose a bill under a take-it-or leave-it option from the onset. When a government party has been enjoying a closed rule since the beginning of the legislative process, it can take advantage of its position as agenda setter independently from the decision costs of the open rule. In other words, it can obtain more than what the parliament can offer if the latter could still choose between a closed rule and an open rule.

Which are the concrete political circumstances that drive to the scenarios b ? (1)

• Government alternation is the most promising candidate among the concrete political circumstances driving towards the scenario b.

• The status quo must be not only far but also controversial. The most systematic source of these shifts comes from government alternation in two ways:

1. The decisions of the previous government are likely to be a status quo far from those of the present government and controversial if the previous opposition wins office.

2. The perspective of the alternation can move the “reversion point” in case of no decision farther than the present status quo and in a controversial area. In other words, the real status quo that the government parties take in consideration can be the potential legislative outcome if the present opposition becomes the next government. Such a crucial change in the political calculus of the government parties takes place when the government alternation has already become a real and experienced possibility.

(in bold the final outcome)

( )if Op VPL q

(in bold the final outcome)

( )if Op VPL q

In the Figure 2d the status quo is no longer controversial as the opposition and the government agree on the direction of change. The change is still blocked by VPL. However, when a shift of the status quo makes the change possible (Fig. 2e), though not certainly by the government alternation as in Fig. 2b or Fig 2c., the procedure adopted will be always open rule and the final outcome will be m. As the opposition Op agrees with the government in changing the status quo, open rule will be always the most convenient procedure for M.

Government alternation crucially affects the position of the status quo and the perception of its stability. When alternation is rare, the status quo in different policy areas is less likely to be between the government and the opposition. It is likely to be in the present government’s range or, at the most, marginally on its left or right. In this case, the status quo is mostly the outcome of decisions taken by the previous government that is ideologically very similar to the present one. In many policy sectors, no real change is possible. In others, the change of status quo is so uncontroversial (as in Fig. 2e) that open rule does not imply higher decision costs and the whole parliament prefers the parliamentary median party position to the status quo. When the alternation is a stable feature of the party system, a decrease of the government’s ideological heterogeneity (or the closeness of one VP to the parliamentary median voter as in the case of minority governments) increases the probability of a change of the formal rules in favor of the government (fig. 2c). Therefore the empirical implication of the model can be summarized in the following two hypotheses:

H1) a high level of government alternation strengthens the agenda-setting power of the government. Government alternation is a necessary and sufficient condition for a less frequent use of the amendment power from the parliament (the “closed rule”).

H2) Government alternation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of new rules that increase formally and permanently the agenda setting power of the government . An increase of the government ideological homogeneity is the other necessary condition.

Summary of model’s implications and hypotheses

Operationalization independent variables:direct I consider a) the party positions identified by the expert surveys

(Laver and Hunt 1989) regarding the issue of “raising taxes to increase public services” (score 1) versus “ cutting public services to cut taxes” (score 20) .

b) Party positions on left-right dimension identified by Huber&Gabel using Party Manifestos with the so called Vanilla tecniqueKnowing these party positions I can calculate for each data source (LH and PM)

• Spatial hetereogeneity of the government-parliament system (Parliament median party-Government distance): Government range when the median party is in the government ; distance between median party and farthest VP when the median party position is not in the government range.

• 2. Different measures of alternations (see below).

Operationalization independent variables:indirect

• Government heterogenity: The number of government parties (Vpnum)

• Alternation: • The proportion of days spent by the

government party (government party predominance) that has been longer in office as an estimation of the level of alternation. The smaller the proportion is , the larger the alternation is.

• The probability that two cabinets taken randomly in time include the party that has been longer in office (government party concentration).

Gallagher index of disproportionality: an electoral system very disproportional amplifies in the parliament the changes that took place among voters: more disproportionality more expectation of alternation.

Operationalization independent variables: expectation of alternation

Operationalization dependent variable (Government legislative agenda setting)

• The government agenda setting power scores identified by Doering (1995) and re-elaborated by Tsebelis (2002) (Doering-Tsebelis Agenda Setting index) . Doering identifies seven variables that contribute to the agenda setting powers of governments when producing ordinary legislation. Tsebelis used principal components and the first factor loadings to weigh each one of these variables and normalized the weighted sum.

Operationalization (direct) of alternation

• Tsebelis Alternation: is the difference between the mid range position of the left-right dimension of two successive “merged” governments. Successive governments with the same ideological range are considered to constitute one single government.

• Median party alternation:is the difference between two parliamentary median parties positions in correspondence “of” two successive “merged”governments.

• Corrected Tsebelis alternation and Corrected median party alternation, allow for the previous differences only when the midrange measure of the previous government or the parliamentary median party position during the previous government, are not included in the present government Pareto set .

The logic of the corrected measures:

General statistics

Correlations

Mod.1 Mod.2 Mod.3 Mod.4 Mod. 5 Mod.6 Mod.7 Mod.8 Mod.9 Mod.10

Constant 1.035***[.3494](0.010)

.6318***[.2104](0.010)

.0194[.1856](0.918)

.0501[.1975](0.803)

.0606 [.1783137](0.739)

.0289[.1891](0.881)

-.1775[.1587](0.282)

-.1888[.1812](0.315)

-.0924[.1670](0.589)

-.1556[.1639](0.359)

Vpnum -.0832 [.0912]0.377

-.0848.0888(0.356)

Government Party Predominance

-.0105*[.0053]0.067)

Government Party concentration

-.6601*[.3220](0.060)

Parliament median party- Government distance

-.0528*[.0286](0.086)

-.0498[.0316](0.137)

-.0446[.0271](0.122)

-.0335[.0328](0.325)

Tsebelis alternation (LH) .0475**[.0208](0.039)

Corrected Tsebelis alternation(LH)

.0418*[.0238](0.100)

Median Party alternation(LH) .0453*[.0213](0.052)

Corrected median party alternation(LH)

.0510**[.0229](0.043)

Parliament median party-Government distance (PM)

-.1795*[.1020](0.100)

-.1019[.1295](0.445)

-.2166*[.1199](0.093)

-.1078[.1208](0.387)

Tsebelis Alternation (PM) .4235***[.1142](0.002)

Corrected Tsebelis alternation (PM)

.4252***[.1326](0.006)

Median party alternation (PM) .4657**[.1852](0.025)

Corrected median party alternation (PM)

.5748***[.1640](0.004)

N. 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17 17

R2 0.4362 0.4332 0.4967 0.4750 0.5256 0.5339 0.4718 0.4582 0.4154 0.4777

* p<0.1 level; **p<0.05 ;***p<0.01 ;****p<0.001

Legislative Agenda Setting (Doering-Tsebelis scores) OLS models with robust standard errors

Legislativa agenda setting power and index of disproportionality

Mod.1 Mod.2 Mod.3

Constant -.1215433[.2075958](0.568)

-.21927 [.1776401](0.237)

-.2327166 [.1370686](0.112)

Vpnum -.0827[.0556465]0.159

Disproportionality .0678204***[.017414](0.002)

.0666413**[.02298](0.012)

.0711045***[.0162823](0.001)

Parliament median party- Government distance (LH)

-.02426[.02216] (0.292)

Parliament median party-Government distance (PM)

-.1192734[.0782676](0.150)

N. 17 17 17

R2 0.6953 0.6695 0.686

Discussion (1)• All measures of alternation are linked significantly

with the legislative agenda setting power of the government. The models with the indirect measures of both the alternation and the government heterogeneity perform worse than the others.

• The measures of ideological heterogeneity (VPnum, Parliament median party –government distance) have always the right sign but they are non significant or marginally significant..

• The “best” models are the models where :1)Alternation is measured as difference between the

ideological position of two parliamentary median parties in succession.

2)Alternation is in fact “possibility of alternation” operationalized by Gallagher disproportionality index.

Discussion (2)• The measures of ideological heterogeneity (VPnum,

parliament median party–government distance) have always a negative sign, as expected in the hypothesis 2, but they are non significant or marginally significant. It is not surprising...

• The proximity of the agenda setter in the government with the parliamentary median voter allows the change in the formal rules. However it does not have to be constant to keep the new rules stable. In other terms while a certain level of homogeneity in the government is necessary for the institutional change in favour of the government, a possible subsequent increase of heterogeneity does not allow the government parties to come back to the original situation. The parties that mostly play an agenda setter role would not have any advantage to reinstate the previous conditions.

Alternation and agenda setting power: which comes first ? The Italian case.

• Causal sequence in this paper: the lack of alternation and the associated centrism of government ==> the weak degree of governmental agenda-setting power

• Causal sequence in Tsebelis paper (2008): weak government agenda-setting power ==> the existence of centrist governments and the lack of government alternation associated therewith.

• The analysis of the recent development of de facto legislative agenda-setting powers in Italy lends some support to the causal sequence

Italian example (change in party system dynamics and ...increase

of government agenda setting power)

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

.0 2.0 4.0 6.0 8.0 10.0 12.0 14.0 16.0 18.0 20.0

DP

PCI

Greens

PR

PSI

PSDI

DC

PRI

PLI

MSI

FM 83FM

87

1983

1987

= CP

Italian example (change in party system dynamics and ...increase

of government agenda setting power)

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

CI

Margherita

SDIUCD

LN

RC

Greens

DS

PPI+RI

AN

CCD-CDU

FI

FM96

FM 01

1996

2001

Italian example (change in party system dynamics and ...increase

of de facto government agenda setting power) "Dom e stic" De le ga ting la w s a nd de le ghe (1963-2007)*

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

ye a rs

del

egh

e

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

del

egat

ing

law

s

Deleghe Delegating laws

Informal changes and Italian government heterogeneity

The Italian recent changes in the legislative practices is a perfect illustration of an increase of the government agenda setting power that does not imply any new rule (in terms of the model a “closed rule” is adopted). According to the model such a circumstance takes place more likely when the government alternation is not coupled with a decrease of the government heterogeneity. The study of recent Italian politics seems to confirm this implication. The presidents of the chambers are crucial actors in the procedure for changing parliamentary standing orders. They chair the rules committees that have the exclusive right to propose amendments to the existing standing orders on the floor. The present standing orders give to the presidents many prerogatives and it is unlikely that they have a strong interest in increasing the power of the executive to the detriment of their power. Moreover the presidencies of the chambers are part of the post-electoral bargaining process among winning coalition parties for the allocation of the relevant offices. In the last four legislatures the president of one chamber has never been a member of the prime minister’s party. The president of a chamber can increase the legislative bargaining power of his/her party, balancing the role played by the Prime Minister’s party. Therefore the political heterogeneity of the Italian government coalition seems to have prevented the creation of new rules, without affecting the strengthening of the government in practice

Conclusions•The central hypothesis of this paper is the following: by affecting the relative position of the status quo, both real and expected government alternation affects the legislative agenda-setting power of the government in parliamentary democracies. In a competitive party system characterized by a large alternation, government parties and the majority in parliament are better off relying on those procedures that limit the debate and preclude the legislative assembly from amending government proposals.• The causal mechanism behind this hypothesis follows the argument recently proposed by Cox (2006) to explain the evolution of rules and procedures in the legislatures: “All busy legislatures will evolve rules that create inequalities in member’s access to plenary time and diminish ordinary members’ ability to delay”. However, the parliaments are not all equally busy and the cabinets are not always the beneficiary in the agenda-setting power distribution. Opportunities for policy change make parliaments busier, but only their controversial nature makes the government stronger.•The study of the Italian case supports also the causal direction implicitly hypothesized in model: Level of alternation and level of “centrism” of government ==> degree of governmental agenda-setting power

Government type

Position of the main actors

Rules when VPL is the agenda setter Rules when VPR is the agenda setter

Oversized Government

O<q<VPL < M <VPR

)

if

[( | - | ] [( | - | | |)]

or if

[( | - | )]

o

o

m g c and VPL g VPL q

VPL m c

Closed rule

Closed rule New Rule

Otherwise No change

)

if

[( | - | ] [( | - | | |)]

or if

[( | - | )]

o

o

m g c and VPL g VPL q

VPR m c

Closed rule

Closed rule New Rule

Otherwise No change

q<VPL < M <VPR<O

Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

Minimum-Winning Government

O<q<M=VPL <VPR

Always closed rule or New Rule or if

[( | - | )] oVPR m c

Closed rule New Rule

Otherwise Closed rule

q<VPL<VPR=M<O Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

Minority Government

O<q<M<VPL <VPR

or if

[( | - | )] oVPL m c

Closed rule New Rule

Otherwise Closed rule

or if

[( | - | )] oVPR m c

Closed rule New Rule

Otherwise Closed rule q<VPL <VPR<

M<O Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

Open rule if [(| -| | |)]VPLmVPLq otherwise No change

1

Table 1Summary of the outcomes with q<VPL