Legislative Policy making in Parliamentary Systems: Opportunities, Conflict and Institutional Constraints

Scholars have recently started to pay more attention to the role of legislatures in managing the risk of ministerial drift in parliamentary governments. In this article, we present and empirically test the implications of a simple model of parliamentary involvement in policymaking. Our model shows that involvement depends on the interaction between, on the one hand, the preference divergence between the responsible minister and its coalition partner(s) and, on the other hand, 1) the formal scope for policy drift and 2) the institutional arrangements at the disposal of the executive for influencing legislative proceedings. These expectations are tested using original data on legislative involvement in the transposition of 821 directives into national law in fifteen European Union member states. We find strong support for our predictions. The risk of ministerial drift and the formal scope for policy drift powerfully interact to increase the likelihood of parliamentary involvement, but the extent of government’s control of the legislative agenda, its advantage in scheduling amendments and the ease with which it can pass a motion of confidence dampen the likelihood of parliamentary activism at given levels of conflict.