Description
Through detailed analyses of legislative success in Argentina and Uruguay, this book explores the determinants of law enactment in fragmented congresses.
Through detailed analyses of legislative success in Argentina and Uruguay, this book explores the determinants of law enactment in fragmented congresses. It describes in detail how the lack of majority support explains legislative success in standing committees, the chamber directorate, and on the plenary floor.
Through detailed analyses of legislative success in Argentina and Uruguay, this book explores the determinants of law enactment in fragmented congresses. It describes in detail how the lack of majority support explains legislative success in standing committees, the chamber directorate, and on the plenary floor.
Plurality-led congresses are among the most pervasive and least studied phenomena in presidential systems around the world. Often conflated with divided government, where an organized opposition controls a majority of seats in congress, plurality-led congresses are characterized by a party with fewer than 50 percent of the seats still in control of the legislative gates. Extensive gatekeeping authority without plenary majorities, this book shows, leads to policy outcomes that are substantially different from those observed in majority-led congresses. Through detailed analyses of legislative success in Argentina and Uruguay, this book explores the determinants of law enactment in fragmented congresses. It describes in detail how the lack of majority support explains legislative success in standing committees, the chamber directorate, and on the plenary floor.
1. Plurality parties, plurality cartels, and legislative success; Part I. Plurality Cartels: 2. Party blocs, committee authorities, and plurality cartels; 3. A statistical model of legislators' success and productivity; Part II. Legislator Success and the Sequential Organization of the Legislative Process: 4. Electoral fragmentation and the effective number of legislative blocs; 5. Legislator success and the committee system in Argentina; 6. On the plenary floor: special motions, vanishing quorum, and the amendment of the plenary schedule; 7. Legislative success in the House; Part III. Beyond Plurality Cartels: 8. The determinants of the president's legislative success; 9. Plurality-led congresses with limited gatekeeping authority: the House of Representatives in Uruguay; 10. Concluding remarks: plurality-led congresses as a research agenda.
'When can legislative coalitions succeed by virtue of disciplined voting, when by virtue of agenda-setting prowess, and when by combining these capacities? Ernesto Calvo's gem of a book takes on these classic themes, powerfully illuminating both the tangled web of Argentine democracy and the politics of legislative control more broadly.' Gary W. Cox, Stanford University
'Ernesto Calvo's book is impressive on many fronts. Calvo marshals systematic empirical measures of key concepts in the study of legislative politics and analyzes them in a sophisticated yet transparent manner. More importantly, he extends our theoretical understanding of the workings of legislatures in presidential systems. Most fundamentally, Calvo points out that in multiparty systems no single party, government or opposition, is likely to have a majority of seats and that theories that assume the presence of unified or divided government are in many ways inadequate. In plurality-led congresses, rules are use
Chapter
Plurality parties vs. plurality cartels
The legislative success of MCs as a research agenda
Why do legislators legislate?
What can we learn from analyzing the Argentine and Uruguayan congresses?
The cost of dissent: the argument of this book
The road to legislative success
The omnibus vote, simple-majority, and super-majority legislative strategies
The determinants of legislative success and the preferences of legislators
Part I Plurality cartels and legislative success
2 Party blocs, committee authorities, and plurality cartels: the Argentine Congress as an institution driven by consent
The sequential organization of House activities: an introduction
The pre-floor bloc (party) meeting and the Chamber Directorate
On the strategic use of quorum by the minority
On the use of different restrictive rules in the plenary
On the use of restrictive amendment rules during debate
Omnibus votes (Article 152) and the gains from the exchange model of legislative success
Majority control and the restrictive use of plenary time
Majority cartels and legislative success: when unanimous consent is lost
Revisiting the procedural cartel model
The loss of majority control: quorum, motions, and the plurality party
Delegating the "vanishing quorum"
decision to party leaders
3 A statistical model of legislative success
A statistical model of legislative success in majority- and plurality-led congresses
Multilevel statistical models and the importance of contextual explanatory variables
Part II Legislative success and the sequential organization of the legislative process
4 Electoral institutions and legislative fragmentation in Argentina: an overview
Elections and the survival of politicians
Nested electoral arenas in state and nation
The election of the president
Parties in politics: Peronists and Radicals
The fragmentation of the party system
The party system seen from congress
The partisan context in congress
5 Legislator success and the committee system in the Argentine House
Committees and the allocation of authority posts in the Argentine House
Explaining success in committee in the Argentine Congress
Measuring success in committee
The determinants of legislative success
The distribution of preferences in committees
Legislator-specific control variables
Bill-dependent control variables
Estimates of legislative success in committee
Appendix 5.A: Committee centrality and bill referrals
Appendix 5.B: Estimation of House members´ ideal points using co-sponsorship data
6 On the plenary floor: special motions, vanishing quorum, and the amendment of the plenary schedule
The use of special motions to amend the plenary schedule
How does the loss of majority support affect the scheduling behavior of MCs?
Beyond the committee gates: setting up the floor agenda
Legislative success on the plenary floor I: motions
The determinants of motion success: the dependent variables
7 Legislative success and legislative productivity in a divided congress
On the subset of bills voted on the plenary floor
The preservation of the plenary
Estimating legislative success on the House floor
Motions and success in the plenary Floor: an alternative specification
Part III Beyond plurality cartels
8 The determinants of the president´s legislative success
The legislative success of the president
The size of the congressional delegation: a puzzle
The president's
decision to go public
Executive success in committee, the House, and the Senate
Explaining amendments to presidential initiatives
An alternative specification
Explaining the president's
legislative success
9 Plurality-led congresses with limited gatekeeping authority: the House of Representatives of Uruguay
Party politics, coalitions, and the House of Representatives in Uruguay
The legislative environment in the House of Representatives of Uruguay
Legislative success and the institutional organization of the House of Representatives
The legislative consideration of initiatives in committee
Majority parties, majority coalitions, and plurality parties in Uruguay
The independent variables
10 Concluding remarks: plurality-led congresses as a research agenda
A theoretical blind spot: the study of plurality-led congresses
Majority rule without majorities
Policy implications of plurality-led congresses
Challenging common perceptions of the Argentine Congress
The sequential organization of the legislative process
Challenging misconceptions about the Argentine Congress
Misconception #1, overpowering majorities: Legislators who do not belong to the majority party bloc are unable to approve their initiatives
Misconception #2, gridlock prone: The loss of majority support significantly reduces the amount of legislation approved in committee and on the plenary floor
Misconception #3, powerlessness: Congress is a surrogate for the exercise of the legislative authority of the president
Misconception #4, unproductive: Almost all legislation proposed and approved in Congress is proposed by the executive
Misconception #5, overwhelming discipline: Majority party leaders are able to approve whatever they deem important because members of Congress fail to challenge them, either by voting or speaking against them on the plenary floor
Legislator Success in Fragmented Congresses in Argentina
：Plurality Cartels, Minority Presidents, and Lawmaking
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